Acknowledgments Heather Maunder's assistance in researching aspects of children's SF and other pertinent children's literature is gratefully acknowledged.

p.3: quote from 'IGY International Geophysical Year' reproduced by permission of Essex Music of Australia Pty Ltd. Unauthorised copying is illegal; p. 4: 'First We Take Manhattan' © 1988 Leonard Cohen Stranger Music, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved; p. 9: 'No Surrender' reproduced by permission of Warner Chappell Music Australia. Unauthorised copying is illegal; p. 12: 'Big Science' written and recorded by Laurie Anderson (Difficult Music). Reprinted by per­mission ofRondor Music (Australia) Pty Ltd; p. 12: cover of Future City reproduced by permission of the publisher; p. 15: the extract from The Total Love Machine and Other Stories by Rosaleen Love, first published by The Women's Press Ltd, 1988, 34 Great Sutton Street, London ECIV ODX, is used by permission of The Women's Press Ltd; p.17: 'Egg Harvest' and 'Flushing' reproduced by permission of Thalia; pp. 21 and 51: Animal Man © 1987 DC Comics Inc. All Rights Reserved; p. 32: The Chronicles of Judge Dredd copyright Fleetway Editions 1992; p. 34: quote from Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home, Victor Gollanz, 1986, reproduced by permission of Victor Gollanz; Scrub Oak illustration by Margaret Chodos from Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin, Harper & Row, 1985. Illustration copyright © 1985 by Margaret Chodos. Reprinted by permis­sion of Margaret Chodos; pp.38-40: Watchmen © 1987 DC Comics Inc. All Rights Reserved; p. 43: (top left) Amazing Stories © & TM TSR, INC. All Rights Reserved; (bottom left) 'The Planet of the Apes' © 1968 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved; p. 44: 'Around the Flame' words Mark Seymour / music Hunters and Collectors (Mushroom Music/Human Frailty). Reproduced by permission of Mushroom Music; p. 61: 'No Surrender' reproduced by permission of Warner Chappell Music Australia. Unauthorised copying is illegal; pp. 63-4: 'Transverse City' and 'Run Straight Down' © Zevon Music-reprinted by permission of Rondor Music (Australia) Pty Ltd; p.65: quote from Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins, Bantam New York, 1990. Reproduced by permission of Bantam Books; p. 69: Graeme O'Neill, 'Mating spiders create genetic tension in Canberra', Age, 10 July 1991. Reproduced by permission of Graeme O'Neill and the Age; pp. 70-1: quote from The Sea and Summer by George Turner, Faber & Faber Ltd, reproduced by permission of the publisher; reading 1: reproduced by permission of Science-Fiction Studies; reading 2: reprinted from Reflections from the Heart of Educational Inquiry, edited by G. Willis and W. H. Schubert, by permission of the State University of New York Press. © 1991 State Univer­sity of New York; reading 3: Primate Visions by Donna Haraway, Routledge, Chapman and Hall Inc. © 1989 by Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.

Laboratories in fiction

Science education and popular media

Noel Gough

Deakin University

Deakin University

This book has been produced as pan of the study materials for ECS8lO Educational issues in science and technology, which is one of the units offered by the Faculty of Education in Deakin University's Open Campus Program. It has been prepared for the unit team, whose members are: Annette Greenall Gough Robyn Muhlebach Frances Patrick (developer) Ian Robottom (chair) Rob Walker

Consultants Beverley Bell, University of Waikato Sharon Dunwoody, University of Wisconsin-Madison Noel Gough, Deakin University Peter Medway, Carleton University Joan Solomon, Oxford University

The study materials include: Beverley Bell, Children's Science, Constructivism and Learning in Science* Sharon Dunwoody, Reconstructing Science for Public Consumption: Journalism as Science Education* Noel Gough, Laboratories in Fiction: Science Education and Popular Media* Patti Lather, Feminist Research in Education: Within/Against* Peter Medway, Shifting Relations: Science, Technology and Technoscience* Educational Issues in Science and Technology: Study Guide and Reader Selected Papers in Science Education: Reader

*These books may be purchased from Deakin University Press, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria, Australia 3217. More titles may be added to this list from time to time. Enrolled students also receive a unit guide, audiocassettes and supplementary material.

Published by Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria, Australia 3217 Distributed by Deakin University Press First published 1993

© Deakin University 1993

Edited, designed and typeset by Deakin University Publishing Unit Printed by Deakin University

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication data

Gough, Noel. Laboratories in fiction: science education and popular media.

Bibliography. ISBN 0 7300 1605 6.

1. Science-Study and teaching. 2. Science fiction-Study and teaching. 3. Mass media-Study and teaching. 4. Communication in science. I. Deakin University. Faculty of Education. Open Campus Program. II. Title.

507.1

Contents

Laboratories in fiction: Science education and popular media Introduction 3

Part 1: Fictions of science education 11 Science education and the misconstruction of 'scientific method' 13 Science is politics by other means: a missing dimension of science education 18 Intermission: political science 23

Part 2: Educating with science fiction 25 Postmodern science: reconnecting fact and fiction 26 Using SF to deconstruct science: Haraway's primatology 37 'Into the future I this nervous game': SF and young people 44 Conclusion 57

Part 3: Sound ideas and (en)light(ening) entenainments 59 Sound ideas: pop music in science and technology education 59 A miscellany of (en)light(ening) entertainments 64 A concluding case study: popular media and climate change 68

Finally. . . 73

Annotated bibliography 75

References 83

Readings 1 Science, science fiction, and a radical science education

E. E. Nunan & David Homer 93

2 An accidental astronaut: Learning with science fiction Noel Gough 113

3 Reprise: Science fiction, fictions of science, and primatology Donna Haraway 122

Acknowledgments 138

In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, ... it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction-conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside our heads.

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind-mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the pre-empting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. J. G. Ballard, Introduction to the French edition of Crash, 1974, p.8

. . . the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, 1991, p.149.

It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education and entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter. It's like setting up a distinction between didactic and lyric poetry on the grounds that one teaches, the other pleases. However, it's always been true that whatever pleases teaches more effectively. Marshall McLuhan, 'Classroom without walls', 1960, p.3.

Introduction

I am not conscious of studying anything called 'science' in primary school ('nature study' was as close as we got). My induction into science-or, rather, Science (and later General Science)-as a discrete subject (that is, object) of study began in secon­dary school during the late 1950s. They were years in which it was easy to be optimistic about science and technology. I have vivid memories of the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year (IGy), many of them associated with atmospheric physics research conducted by Australian scientists in Antarctica. Atmospheric conditions during the IGY (I think they had something to do with intense sunspot activity) allowed the aurora australis to be visible from southern Australia. I spent many warm summer nights on the beach near my home in South Melbourne watching the luminous streamers radiating just above the horizon and my thoughts would often drift to imagining the life of an Antarctic scientist - and envisioning myself in such a role. But my heroic visions of this life were drawn less from science textbooks or journalism than from novels like Simon Black in the Antarctic (1956), one ofa series of Simon Black books by Australian children's author Ivan Southall. Simon Black was a brilliant aerospace inventor, engineer, pilot and United Nations special agent whose adventures took him to many exotic locations, including Mars and Venus, and he was one among several imaginary people who contributed a great deal to the scientific optimism of my childhood dreams (see also Gough 1991; Reading 2). In 1957 I watched Sputnik 1 orbiting the eanh, delighted to see (at last!) the tangible evidence of humankind's entry into the space age (I was, of course, almost oblivious ofits cold-war implications). Looking back at the late 1950s, Donald Fagen (1982) neatly captures the buoyant mood of many young people in his song, 'IGY (International Geophysical Year)':

Get your ticket to that wheel in space While there's time The fix is in You'll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky You know we've got to win Here at home we'll play in the city Powered by the sun Perfect weather for a streamlined world There'll be spandex jackets one for everyone

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· .. A just machine to make big decisions Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision We'll be clean when their work is done We'll be eternally free yes and eternally young

What a beautiful world this'll be What a glorious time to be free

At high school, then. throughout my undergraduate studies in science and edu­cation, and again during my years as a teacher of high school science and biology, my enthusiasm for science never waned, though I became much more cynical about the 'compassion and vision' of those who orchestrated the 'big decisions'. It was not until I became a teacher educator in 1972, initially as a lecturer in methods of teaching biology and science, that I began to reflect critically on the assump­tions underlying my enthusiasm. Given the length of time I have now worked in teacher education, and to pre-empt any tendencies toward self-satisfaction or complacency in this account, I cannot resist quoting Leonard Cohen (1988) here:

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom For trying to change the system from within I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

This monograph is an example of 'trying to change the system from within' and also illustrates one of the ways in which I have tried to escape 'boredom'. In the spirit of Cohen's lyrics, I will interpret 'coming to reward them' as dedicating this monograph to the now absent presence of my high school and university science teachers: it could only have been written without them.

The second and fourth verses of Cohen's song are more directly pertinent to the content of this monograph:

I'm guided by a signal from the heavens I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin ...

I don't like your fashion business, mister I don't like these drugs that keep you thin I don't like what happened to my sister First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

In these highly compressed images, Cohen captures many of the confusions and contradictions of the contemporary world and the ambiguous roles of science and technology in shaping it. The ironies that are a mere whisper in Fagen's evoca­tion of the mood of the late 1950s ('The fix is in I ... we've got to win') are an ominous presence in the late 1980s. Anticipating a 'wheel in space' (like the one that waltzes serenely about the Earth in visual harmony with 'The Blue Danube' in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey 1968) is a very different 'signal from

4

the heavens' from those anticipated by Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initia­tive (SDI). Calling the latter 'Star Wars' was ingenious because, by association, it cloaks SDI in the epic grandeur of George Lucas's cinematic saga. But it is one thing to contemplate 'the beauty of ... weapons' in a mythic realm (the movie Star Wars was set 'a long time ago in a galaxy far away') and a very different matter to romanticise them in the world we inhabit (SDI was intended to be here, now).

Similarly, the world that Fagen sees us as once having anticipated-affluent ('spandex jackets ... for everyone'), hygienic ('we'll be clean') and healthy ('we'll be ... eternally young')-has not emerged from the work of the 'fellows with com­passion and vision'. Instead, as Cohen insinuates, science and technology have added to the power of patriarchal interests to exploit and oppress people, especially women, through the global fashion industry, multinational drug corporations and experimentation in reproductive technologies. I don't like that either, and that is why we need to 'take' Manhattan and Berlin-to deal critically with all that is represented by these emblematic sites of Western society and culture. Apart from their centrality in the art and commerce of their respective continents, Manhattan and Berlin are culturally connected in other ways-many ofthem symbolic. For example, the development of the USA's atomic bomb, known as the Manhattan Project, was a significant precursor to the building by the Eastern bloc of the cold war's most enduring symbol, the Berlin wall.

'First We Take Manhattan' can be interpreted as a set of snapshots sampling the material conditions and manifestations of what is now widely known as 'the postmodern condition'. As Katherine Hayles (1990, p. 265) writes, one of the charac­teristics of 'cultural post modernism' is the 'convoluted ambiguity' which accom­panies 'the realization that what has always been thought of as the essential, unvarying components of human experience are not natural facts ofHfe but social constructions'. This ambiguity is revealed in the diverse-and not necessarily welcome-products of science and technology ('the beauty of our weapons', 'the drugs that keep you thin') and the power arrangements through which their uses are mediated. Technologically sophisticated weapons and drugs, and the global marketplace which controls them, have reconstructed our 'natural' senses of beauty and health in complex and contradictory ways.

Juxtaposing 'IGY' with 'First We Take Manhattan' raises, through the medium of popular song, a number of problems and issues concerned with the convoluted interrelationships of science, technology and society. Similar problems and issues have been addressed in recent years from a variety of academic perspectives, with critical feminist scholars providing some of the most cogent and trenchant cri­tiques. For example, Ruth Bleier (1986, p. 57) writes:

Science is an integral part, expression, and product of a culture's complex set of ideologies, and it has ideological commitments to certain social beliefs, values, and goals. These commitments are, on the one hand, a source of its great strength and value and, on the other, the source of its oppressive power ... It was, after all, in response to our society's social beliefs, values, and urgent needs that scientists, for example, worked to develop antibiotics before and during the Second World War, at the same time that other scientists worked to develop the atom bomb, a weapon designed not to save lives by

5

bringing a quick end to the war with Japan but to announce the ultimate phallic power and hegemony of United States capitalism in the leadership of the coming war against the Soviet Union.

Like Leonard Cohen, Bleier uses images of medicine and weapons to invoke some of the dilemmas we face in trying to understand science and transform the ter­rifying power that it represents. Taken together, 'IYG' and 'First We Take Man­hattan' can be read as a text complementing Bleier's essay - a different but compatible expression of the hopes and fears which are aroused by the promises and threats of scientific 'progress'.

You do not have to agree with my particular interpretation of 'First We Take Manhattan' to acknowledge that it generates meanings appropriate to studies of science and technology. Popular art is like that, full of plastic allusions that can be retrofitted to the consumer's consciousness. Popular media are sometimes seen as ephemeral, disposable. But, like art in any medium, popular artefacts-songlines, snippets of melody, archetypal images, pithy lines of dialogue, characters in movies, TV shows, novels, plays and comic strips-have a way of working themselves into our individual and collective memories and mythologies. As J. G. Ballard observes, 'pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future' (in Vale & Juno 1984, p. 155). I did not use 'First We Take Manhattan' just because the lyrics speak to me ofissues in science and technology studies, but also because Leonard Cohen's songs are among the 'lowly trivia of possessions' that I am 'lugging along ... into the future'. They are part of the conceptual 'equipment' which connects me with the world and helps me to make sense of it.

This monograph is about making connections-connections between science and popular media that enrich science education and respect popular art and artists. Consider, for example, the following excerpt from Janette Turner Hospital's novel, Charades (1988, p.191):

'Question,' Charade says. 'If a woman stands in the middle of Massachusetts Avenue facing MIT, but her memory is so vividly snagged on one particular day of her childhood in the village of Le Rainey that she is unaware . . . that she is oblivious to the cars around her and so she is hit, run over, killed ... Is she more truly in Boston or France when she dies?'

'Well put,' Koenig says. 'The indeterminacy problem in a nutshell.'

This passage does several things. First, it illustrates one of the ways in which meanings emerge, unforced, in the course of everyday conversation. Charade and Koenig are not involved in a didactic exchange in which one is trying to transmit to the other a stipulative definition of quantum indeterminism as explicated by Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr-they are simply having a chat. Second, given that Charade's question is itself a response to something that Koenig has said pre­viously (though the details of their earlier conversation are unimportant), both Charade and Koenig are modelling a strategy for good teaching which Garth Boomer (1982, pp. 119-20) calls 'connecting':

6

The teacher is a senior reader of the school culture and special senior reader of the specialist subculture of the subject. Wittingly or unwittingly, he/she is demonstrating how to be a reader and maker of meaning ...

The more richly the teacher can spin a tapestry of metaphor and analogy into a 'thick' redundant text of thinking about something new, the more likely it is that students will find a way in.

If students are encouraged to spin out reciprocally their own webs of anecdote, metaphor and analogy, it is less likely that some will remain outside the next text.

The art of generating apt analogy and metaphor is central to the 'reading' teacher's task.

Charade and Koenig are 'reading' each other's speech acts and responding by spinning reciprocally 'their own webs of anecdote, metaphor and analogy'. The third thing this passage does is to exemplify a point of entry to a subject matter of science that is different from that used by most science teachers. Charades is a popular novel which incorporates many ideas drawn from quantum mechanics, field theories and other aspects of postmodern subatomic physics. In pan this is because one of the main characters is a research physicist, but it is also because the author is playing creatively with the existential and metaphysical implications of quantum theory. Charades is not only more pleasurable to read than most physics textbooks-one reviewer called it 'an example of that old-fashioned, almost extinct phenomenon, the novel you can't put down' - but it also situates meanings drawn from the subatomic world of quantum physics within the politics of everyday human activity and experience. It is also worth noting that much of the physics explored in Charades is ignored by the majority of conventional school science textbooks. Even though the 'new physics' has now been with us for more than a hundred years, few textbooks pay more than lip-service to its existence, let alone explore its implications for our understandings of what another popular novelist (Adams 1982) calls 'life, the universe and everything'.

Neither Charades nor 'First We Take Manhattan' is an isolated example. I could have made similar points to the above using novels like Tom Robbins's Skinny Legs and All (1990) or Lewis Shiner's Deserted Cities of the Heart (1988) and songs such as Paul Simon's 'The Boy in the Bubble' (1986) or Sting's 'We Work the Black Seam' (1985). In this monograph I will demonstrate that popular media­music, movies, comics, novels and so on (and especially media that are popular among children and teenagers)-are rich and meaningful sources ofinformation, images and insights concerning science, technology and society (and the interrela­tionships among them). I will also argue that popular media are much more than 'icing on the cake', a way of illustrating the subject matters of science in a way that is entertaining and 'relevant' to young people. Rather, popular media can quite literally provide sites for inquiries into the meanings of scientific concepts and methods and provide some of the 'equipment' (as Ballard puts it) for investigating problems and issues of science, technology and society.

I am thus affirming for science education a position adopted already by many teachers in subjects such as English language and literature, media studies and

7

social education, namely, that popular media are 'texts' in their own right and that they merit close 'reading' by both teachers and learners - who should also be encouraged to respond to them critically and creatively. The title, Laboratories in Fiction, was chosen deliberately to emphasise two key propositions that underlie this monograph, namely:

• that 'laboratories' - in their various roles as sites, symbols, emblems and metaphors of scientific labour-are represented in numerous and diverse ways in popular media and that these images of science should be a significant pan of the sub­stance ('content') of science education; and

• that popular media are themselves 'laboratories of ideas' in which meanings are subjected to experimentation.

At this point, I should clarify my use of the term 'popular'. By popular media I mean those produced with the deliberate intention of having wide appeal, especially (but not exclusively) among young people. It is not necessary for a work to achieve such wide appeal to be designated 'popular' -a pop song is still a pop song even if it doesn't make it into the Top 40. I will also focus chiefly on works of 'an' (such as songs) and 'fiction' (such as comics, novels, movies) rather than what might better be called science journalism - even though magazines such as New Scientist and television documentaries such as 'The Astronomers' and those presented by the ubiquitous Davids. (Attenborough, Bellamy, Suzuki) are quite clearly 'popular media'. Science journalism is addressed in depth in another monograph in this series (Dunwoody 1993).

Nearly three decades ago, Marshall McLuhan argued persuasively for teaching and learning with the texts and anefacts of mass media and popular culture. His reasoning included the following assertions:

Where student interest is already focused is the natural point at which to be in the elucidation of other problems and interests. The educational task is not only to .provide basic tools of perception but also to develop judgment and discrimination with ordinary social experience .

. . . To be articulate and discriminating about ordinary affairs and information is the mark of an educateq [person]. (McLuhan 1960, p.3)

The idea that learning should begin 'where student interest is already focused' has long been a cliche among contemporary liberal-progressive educators, but its sentiments may be honoured more in rhetoric than in young people's experience. More imponantiy, in developing 'judgment and discrimination with ordinary social experience', it is not sufficient for teachers merely to begin 'where student interest is already focused' and then retreat to the relative security of their own interests and experience. Teachers must also be sympathetic and responsive to the 'cultural ecology' of children's lives (see also Bowers & Flinders 1990; Gough 1987, 1989b). Regrettably, many young people still leave the compulsory years of schooling with feelings similar to those expressed by Bruce Springsteen (1984) in the song 'No Surrender':

8

Well we busted out of class We had to get away from those fools We learned more from a three-minute record Than we ever learned in school ...

The main body of this monograph is organised into three sections. In Part I, I will outline some of the fictions of science education as it is presently conceived and delivered through conventional schooling. Here I will develop the argument that the media and resources on which conventional science education presently depends (textbooks and laboratories) seriously misrepresent science in education and that we therefore need to look to other media and resources to assist us in constructing a defensible science curriculum.

In Part 2, I will discuss the possible contributions of science fiction (in print and electronic media) to science education. I will argue that the blurring of bound­aries between 'scientific fact' and science fiction provide numerous opportunities for developing critical understandings of problems and issues in science, technology and society. The readings included in this monograph also deal centrally with the connections that can be constructed between science, science fiction and science education.

Finally, in Part 3 I will consider the contributions to science education of some popular media other than those which attract the label 'science fiction', with par­ticular reference to pop music, mainstream popular novels and cinema, and chil­dren's literature.

In an epigraph to this monograph I quote J. G. Ballard's (1974, p. 8) suggestion that 'we live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind'. My hope is that this mono­graph will assist teachers in becoming more critical readers of the fictions that presently constitute school science education and more sensitive and responsive readers of all those other fictions of science and technology - inscriptions, images, metaphors and myths-that abound in the popular media that frame and permeate our own and young people)s material and imagined lives.

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Part 1 Fictions of science education

Part of my argument in Laboratories in Fiction is a plea for more diversity in the media resources used in science education. Conventional learning in school science can presently be characterised by its dependence on one highly specialised kind of print medium (the textbook) and one highly specialised kind of classroom (the laboratory). Such a restricted range of resources might be justified if they were demonstrably superior to the available alternatives, but I contend that they are not. For example, among the purposes and functions usually attributed to these special kinds of texts and classrooms (and among the justifications for the costs involved in providing them) are those concerned with representing science and its cultural significance to learners. I will argue here that school science textbooks and laboratories do not fulfil even this minimal requirement.

Given that science education identifies itself with the scholarly disciplines of science (and given that science is a significant expression of Western industrial society's values and goals), it is reasonable to expect science educators to 'play fair' when they devise the media and resources which represent these disciplines to learners. However, many (perhaps most) textbooks misrepresent science by incor­porating idealised, oversimplified and outdated accounts of scientific work and its consequences. Similarly, most school laboratories are crude stereotypes of the diverse sites in which scientists pursue their labours. The work that is done in them­indeed, the work that can be done in them - bears little or no resemblance to con­temporary professional practice in the physical and biological sciences. This has been exacerbated by the rise and spread of highly industrialised and technologised 'big science' which, especially in the physical sciences, requires very different fa­cilities from those on which school laboratories are modelled. Little of what now counts as 'progress' among communities of working scientists is accomplished by the sort of individualistic, small-scale, low-tech 'bench work' to which schoollabora­tories are suited (this point is also central to the critique of science education offered by Nunan and Homer 1981; see Reading I). 'Big science' has also become a metaphor for a particular kind of cultural orientation or world view that is now common in Western industrial societies (see exhibit 1: 'Big Science').

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Exhibit 1: 'Big Science' Avant-garde performance artist Laurie Anderson had a popular hit in the early 1970s with '0 Superman', which is included on her album Big Science. Some excerpts from the title song are quoted below. While one really needs to hear the performance as a totality to make the most of Anderson's meanings, the lyrics are a witty testimony to the cultural significance of 'big science'. Giving street directions by reference to 'absent presences' is a wry comment on contemporary myths of technological 'progress' - exemplified in Australia recently by the Very Fast Train and Multifunction Polis projects. These projects, which have their genesis in the mysteries of global trade relations, high finance and transnational corporatism, represent a kind of 'technocratic dreaming' (James 1990) - optimistic, futuristic, visionary - which mask their possible adverse effects on Australian lifestyles and environ­ments. Big Science and the kinds of science fiction stories collected in books like Future City (Elwood 1976) help us to decode the myths surrounding such projects.

Hey Pal! How do I get to town from here? And he said: Well just take a right where they're going to build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they're going to put in the freeway, take a left at what's going to be the new sports center, and keep going until you hit the place where they're thinking of building that drive-in bank. You can't miss it. And I said: This must be the place .

. . . Golden cities. Golden towns. And long cars in long lines and great big signs

and they all say: Hallelujah. Yodellayheehoo. Golden cities. Golden townS. Thanks for the ride.

Big Science. Hallelujah. Big Science. Yodellayheehoo.

You know. I think we should put some mountains here. Otherwise, what are the characters going to fall off of? And what about stairs? Yodellayheehoo ...

Big Science. Hallelujah. Big Science. Yodellayheehoo. Hey Professor! Could you turn out the lights?

Let's roll the film. Big Science. Hallelujah ... Big Science. Hallelujah. Yodellayheehoo.

Laurie Anderson, 'Big Science', Big Science, Warner Bros, 1982.

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Science textbooks and laboratories are literally science fictions in the original sense of the Latinfictio, 'something fashioned by a human agent'. But they also fictional­ise science in ways that are likely to impede learners' understanding of the meaning and significance of science in our society and culture. In the following discussion, I will focus on two broad ways in which science education presently fails to represent science to learners in an educationally defensible fashion. First, the routine activi­ties that are conducted in school laboratories neither emulate nor simulate 'real' scientific work but, rather, reiterate stereotypical and mythologised conceptions of science and its methods. Second, these activities are usually conducted without reference to (or representation of) the ideological commitments that animate scientific work or the political strategies through which it exerts authority in our society. Thus, school science education may actually serve to 'double insulate' learners from understanding what scientists actually do and do not do. As Linda Gordon (1986) claims for history, no 'objective' truths may be possible, but there are objective lies. There can be better and worse science fictions; there can be better and worse representations of science in schools.

Science education and the misconstruction of 'scienti'fic method' In Donna Haraway's words: 'Laboratories are the material and mythic space of modern science' (1989, p.368). For the moment, I will defer the question of the extent to which laboratories are also the material and mythic space of postmodern science and will simply note that postmodern discourses tend to pay increasing attention to the mythic space and to the overlapping (fused/confused) boundaries of the material and the mythic. I am very sympathetic to many postmodernisms, but my immediate concern is with the problem of representing contemporary science (a key cultural site for contesting modernist/postmodernist paradigms) to learners in some intellectually honest and morally responsible way.

During the last two decades, a number of studies of scientists at work (e.g. Latour & Woolgar 1979; Mitroff 1974; Latour 1983; Charlesworth et a1. 1989) have explored the material and mythic spaces of science in some detail, illuminating differences between what is actually done in sites of scientific labour and what Mitroff (1974, p. 8) calls 'the storybook image of science' - an image constructed from what scientists say they do and what society at large believes they do. This 'storybook' image-a myth-permeates the majority of conventional science edu­cation textbooks and curriculum statements. For example, several elements of this myth are prominent in the most recent draft of A National Statement on Science for Australian Schools (Australian Education Council 1991 ). The Statement begins by describing 'the characteristics of science' as follows:

Science is among our greatest achievements. It has revolutionised the way we think about the world and the way in which we live. Using the principles and processes of science we can construct useful and reliable explanations and knowledge of the natural and physical world.

The principles of science give validity and rigour to scientific explanations ... (1991, p.4)

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The Statement then lists a number offamiliar examples of these principles ('respect for evidence', 'testable and falsifiable hypotheses', etc.) and processes ('predicting, observing, testing hypotheses and models, collecting, classifying ... ' etc.). Much of the remainder of the Statement is devoted to elaborating 'the scope of science education' in terms of two 'process strands' ('investigating in science' and 'under­standing and applying scientific knowledge') and four 'conceptual strands' ('life and living', 'energy and change', 'natural and processed materials' and 'earth and space'). The Statement as a whole thus characterises science in terms of explana­tory concepts and generalisations whose warrant and status are justified by a par­ticular way of thinking. While the Statement does not ignore the social and cultural dimensions of scientific activity, it asserts nevertheless that the truth claims of scientists are privileged by the special qualities of the method that is used to produce them: 'Although science is socially constructed, the processes and principles of science still enable scientific knowledge to be developed which is generally reliable, useful and well accepted' (Australian Education Council 1991, p.4; my emphases). It is worth considering what might be implied by the terms 'although' and 'still' here. Are the authors suggesting that the social construction of knowledge diminishes its reliability, usefulness and acceptability? (If so, are they implying that it is possible to imagine knowledge which is not socially constructed and, ifso, who-or what-is in a position to make such a judgment?) The deferential 'although' suggests that the authors are apologising for science being socially constructed, but then they reassure the reader that, nevertheless ('still'), this troublesome complication can be overcome by applying 'the processes and principles of science' - as if social con­structedness were a curable disease. This rhetorical ploy reasserts the privileged status of scientific knowledge by implying that scientific method transcends (or 'in theory' can transcend) social construction. .

Studies of scientists at work provide numerous grounds not only for questioning this apparent faith in the products of experimentalism but also for disputing the textbook image of science. For example, Charlesworth et a1. (1989, p. 271) conclude that: 'What strikes one forcefully as one looks at the way scientists carryon in reality, is the enormous disparity between that reality and the idealized or mythical accounts of it that are given by both observers of science and scientists themselves' (see exhibit 2: 'Scientists at Work').

A persistent and pervasive myth is that scientific work is characterised by a special kind of method. But as Latour writes:

Now that field studies of laboratory practices are starting to pour in, we are beginning to have a better picture of what scientists do inside the walls of these strange places called 'laboratories' ... The result, to summarise it in one sentence, was that nothing extraordinary and nothing 'scientific' was happening inside the sacred walls of these temples. (1983, p.141)

Charlesworth et a1. reach similar conclusions:

... the neat classical picture of deductions being made from theories and then tested by observation and experiment (the so-called hypothetico-deductive

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Exhibit 2: 'Scientists at Work' The 'classical' image of the scientist at work, as depicted at right in a 1927 illustration from the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories (reproduced in Frewin 1974, p. 60), is that of the solitary male, excited and awe-inspired by the fruits of his benchwork. Compare this image with the one that emerges from the excerpts quoted below from Rosaleen Love's story, 'The laws of life'.

'I've been out with the turtle man. Stokesie, d'you know him? He's always there when they're laying. Before they know it, he's caught them, measured the distance between their eyes, clipped their flippers and counted their eggs. He usually publishes six papers every laying season .

. . . We looked around the coral island. So far, we had hammered in about twenty yellow stakes along a north-west transect. Karen was leaping about with a large white butterfly net, collecting insects. Greg was trundling a pedometer around the low water mark. 'All right,' said Peter, 'we're normal, but he's weird.' Greg wore a yellow oilskin, green tracksuit trousers, legs unzipped to show wet socks and dirty sandshoes underneath. Greg gave us a wave. Then he stopped his measurements, frowned and trundled his pedometer up the beach to us. Carefully, he rolled the pedometer over my leg.

'That's weird,' I said to Peter. 'Unacceptable margin of error,' muttered Greg, as he put his machine

into reverse and made off down the beach to the shoreline. Scientific research is like that .

. . . That night, back on the ship, we sat at the same table, the professors and I, commensal, as they say in the world of protective hosts and protected guests. The barnacle on the carapace of the hawksbill turtle, or the anemone on the shell of the hermit crab both eat at the same table as their host carriers. The barnacle must wait for the turtle to take it to places where the plankton is plentiful. So the graduate student must rely on attaching herself to a professor who knows where the grant money flows freely.

Brodie was one of the best at attracting money. He could always be relied on to predict one natural disaster or another just before the grant money was handed out. 'Box jellyfish terror', the newspapers would announce, just as the jellyfish season ended and the grants season began.

It was the joke session that did me in. 'Have you heard the one about Sara Pipelini?' asked Brodie, and we all said, 'No,' as one does. Up till then I had managed to laugh in all the right places ... I didn't notice when Brodie stopped talking and I was far away when everyone else was laughing. These things add up, these moments of obtuseness, they count. The inability to see the point of a professional joke may be interpreted as a lack of that empathic sensitivity to the group so necessary for the scientific teamwork of today. (Love 1989, pp.40-2)

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method) scarcely ever corresponds to the reality of the scientific process. Much of scientific investigation relies on a pragmatic 'let's try it and see what happens' approach, and the getting of data is all important ...

Instead of concentrating on 'the method' of science as philosophers of science from Bacon to Popper have done, then, we should fix our attention on ... 'data generation systems', involving techniques, instrumentation, experimental materials (mice, sheep) co-ordinated networks and so on. (1989, p. 271)

Data generation systems are typically designed to transform experimental materials into specified forms of inscription. For example, during his studies at the Salk Institute, Latour claims to have been struck by the way in which many features of laboratory practice could be ordered by looking

not at the scientists' brains (I was forbidden access!), at the cognitive structures (nothing special), at the paradigms (the same for thirty years), but at the transformation of rats and chemicals into paper ... the way in which anything and everything was transformed into inscriptions ... was what the laboratory was made for. (1986, p. 15)

Latour also emphasises the extent to which laboratory scientists depend on the inscribed products of data generation systems: 'their end result, no matter the field, was always a small window through which one could read a very few signs from a rather poor repertoire (diagrams, blots, bands, columns) ... When these resources were lacking, the selfsame scientists stuttered, hesitated, and talked nonsense' (1986, pp. 3-4). In other words, while the discursive authority of science in society and education is supported by the mystique of 'scientific method', the truth claims in which working scientists have confidence appear to be restricted to whatever is expressed through their inscription devices- the ways of writing and diagram­ming that are specific to the data generation systems they have constructed (see exhibit 3: 'Egg Harvest' and 'Flushing').

Much science education is thus founded on a spurious representation of the inter­relationships between data generation systems, 'scientific knowledge' and 'scientific method'. For example, in the National Statement on Science for Australian Schools cited above, data generation is presented as though it invariably takes place as part of a rational sequence of activities that can be described in terms of ' the scientific method' for producing 'scientific knowledge'. Such a rationalised presentation ignores the pragmatics and social determinants of data production (not to mention the imagination, skill and ingenuity with which laboratory scientists develop data gener­ation systems and inscription devices for particular purposes). Furthermore, as Charlesworth et al. (1989, p. 271) observe, 'irrational and uncontrollable factors­lucky breaks, playing one's hunches, being in the right place at the right time­also playa disconcertingly large part in scientific discovery'.

If the rationalised version of scientific method 'scarcely ever corresponds to the reality of the scientific process' then the privileged status of 'scientific knowledge' must be questioned. It is sheer hypocrisy for science educators to assert that 'the processes and principles of science ... enable scientific knowledge to be devel­oped which is generally reliable, useful and well accepted' (Australian Education

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Exhibit 3: 'Egg Harvest' and 'Flushing' 'Egg Harvest' and 'Flushing' are two in a series of five 'concrete' (or visual) poems by Melbourne-based poet Thalia. First published as postcards, the series is reprinted in Haw­thorne and Klein (1991, pp. 128-32) who observe that these highly condensed images express 'the pain and bewilderment women experience when they enter the high-tech world of modern medicine. Using the tradition of stenography, the sequence represents the inter­action between language, representation, politics and science' (Hawthorne & Klein 1991, p. x). These images can also be read as an ironic comment on the 'shorthand' produced by scientists' inscription devices which reduce complex human activities and perceptions to 'a very few signs from a rather poor repertoire' (Latour 1986, p. 3).

----::--=-=------~. EGG HARVEST ----

C')...t • Frozen

'--.--" Farming

J • Eggs

'\.. _ Harvesting

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I I I

I I

Council 1991, p. 4) if it can be demonstrated that these 'processes and principles' do not characterise the work of practising scientists. Indeed, the studies of working scientists cited here clearly demonstrate the underdetermination of scientific truth claims by the evidence that is claimed to support them. Despite the myth of the definitive experiment which reliably separates truth from error, very few 'well­accepted' hypotheses are discarded simply on the basis of experimental refutation. Textbook accounts of scientific method rarely acknowledge that anyone exper­iment usually suppons several alternative hypotheses, that experiments may be easier to design than to carry out, and that many experimental results are much less clear cut than is suggested by the reductionist forms of inscription (and res­tricted languages of interpretation) in which they are represented and reponed. A 'well-accepted' theory may be supported by one selection of data and under­mined by others. To say that a given scientific theory is 'reliable, useful and well accepted' does not mean that it has emerged from rigorous application of the textbook version of scientific method but, rather, that it constitutes a social agree­ment constructed by the participants in a particular 'conversation'.

Science is polities by other means: a missing dimension of science education To understand how a scientific theory can be both 'well accepted' and under­determined by data requires that we look beyond the material space oflaboratory work to the 'mythic space' constituted by the cultural discourses in which scien­tists participate. The work of critical feminist scholars has been particularly illuminating in this respect. For example, as pan of her synthesis of several detailed examinations of scientific theories of gender difference, Ruth Bleier writes that

the notion that significant cognitive sex differences exist and that explanations for them may be found by looking for biological sex differences in the development, structure, and functioning of the brain . . . is legitimized by an elaborate network of interdependent hypotheses ... Standing alone, few of the hypotheses have any independent scientific support, but together, supported by each other, they create the illusion of a structure of weight, consistency, conviction, and reason. In support of [their commitment to scientific theories of gender difference], scientists make increasing numbers of unsubstantiated conjectures that are then taken up by other scientists as confirming evidence for their own unsubstantiated conjectures. (1986, p.58)

Bleier's example draws attention to a dimension of scientific work that is conspicu­ously absent from conventional school science education: science is not only a matter of generating data and inscribing them in the material spaces of laboratories but also involves the generation, transformation and interpretation of meanings in the mythic space which laboratories symbolise. In Latour's phrase: 'science is politics continued by other means' (1984, p. 257). Latour emphasises that his view does not 'reduce' science to politics-to arbitrary power rather than rational knowledge. Rather, Latour directs attention to the importance of discerning the 'other means' by which scientists exercise political power. These include particular narrative

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strategies and the authority to deploy them with a given audience. It is in scien­tists' interests to maintain what Haraway (1986, p. 83) calls a 'mystifying dichotomy' between power and knowledge-to be able to claim that they are doing research rather than practising politics when they are wittingly, or unwittingly, doing both. One way of sustaining this dichotomy is by separating 'research' from the language in which it is conceived and reported. As Judith Brett writes:

Scientists do their research, then write it up. The writing is seen as ancillary, after the fact, and in no way constitutive of the research itself. The adoption of this way of talking about research masks the centrality of language and writing ... The fiction is of reality apprehended before language and of the act of writing as a simple one of reporting on or describing that apprehension. The true work is thus seen as collecting the facts, ... the findings, and the writing is simply the report, written in the plain impersonal style characteristic of reports, as if the author were absent. The role of language in shaping and probing reality is denied ... (1991, p. 519)

In other words, scientific writing masks the extent to which scientists' language produces the data they report. The narrative strategies of scientific writing (such as the use of the passive voice) create an illusion of neutrality, objectivity and anonymity which contributes to the authority of the text. Scientists tend to write as though language is merely another inscription device - a vehicle for transmit­ting data about the objects and outcomes of their research-rather than a medium which generates a multiplicity of meanings. The meaning of a scientific report is not fixed in printed words or in their representation of an author's intentions but, rather, in the reading of the report by others, such as colleagues, students, science journalists and members of the public. The strategic effect of deploying a facade of neutrality is captured well by Bleier in relation to the reporting of a number of studies of human and rat brains which purport to provide evidence of sex differences in the hemispheric lateralisation of visuo-spatial function:

However unreflective the process may be, scientists ... are able to stop just short of making the kinds of assertions that their own and others' data cannot defensibly support, yet they can remain secure in the knowledge that their readers will supply the relevant cultural meaning to their text; for example, that women are innately inferior in the visuospatial and (therefore) the mathematical skills, and that no amount of education or social change can abolish this biological gap. It is disingenuous for scientists to pretend ignorance of their readers' beliefs and expectations and unethical to disclaim responsibility for the effects of their work and for presumed misinterpretations of their 'pure' texts. Scientists are responsible, since they themselves build ambiguities and misinterpretations into the writing itself. (1986, p.62)

Much science journalism in the mass media (as represented by, for example, ABC radio's 'The Science Show' and the Channel Seven television network's 'Beyond 2000') attempts to 'supply the relevant cultural meaning' on behalf of the listening and viewing audience. With notable exceptions (such as ABC science broadcaster Norman Swan's exposure of William McBride's misrepresentations of his medical research), such journalism tends to be adulatory and relatively uncritical. It is left

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to popular 'fiction' to cultivate suspicion of the scientist's voice (see exhibit 4: 'Lab Coat: Robe of Innocence or Klansman's Sheet?').

When Latour (1983, pp. 141-2) reported his investigations oflaboratory life he was impelled to ask a 'naive but nagging question: if nothing scientific is happening in laboratories, why are there laboratories to begin with and why ... is the society surrounding them paying for these places where nothing special is produced?' But, as Damien Broderick suggests, we might just as well ask:

If nothing metaphysical was happening in medieval monasteries, as plenty of atheists would surmise, why did society pay for them? If nothing of security is being fostered by the overwhelming multiplication of nuclear weapons and 'conventional' arms, why are we all paying so much for them? The answer, as always, lies at the intersection of power and knowledge. Religion and the profession of arms and the exercise of theoretical and laboratory skills are all arenas for the deployment of authority, the insertion of levers, the exertion of force. (1987, p.33)

As we well know, the forces of science and technology can be exerted for both good and evil- and for purposes of ambiguous virtue (like 'the beauty of our weapons' and 'the drugs that keep you thin'). Science educators must consider how best to represent science in schools so that both its virtues and its vices are under­stood and so that learners are invited to participate in the transformation of science's oppressive power (for example, by resisting and challenging the strategic rhetoric of scientific writing which allows a passive voice to command such coercive authority).

As material places, school laboratories neither resemble the sites in which most scientists work nor are they used for the kind of experimentation and data gener­ation that characterises much professional science. Rather, they are places where students follow recipes, perform routine procedures, rehearse technical skills (e.g. manipulating apparatus, monitoring instruments, measuring and recording), demonstrate the reliability of selected ('well-accepted') scientific 'laws' or phenom­ena-and falsify their data when the procedures and demonstrations produce incon­clusive or 'unexpected' results. By tolerating and tacitly approving the falsification of data, science educators not only contradict their own mythology-faith in the 'scientific method' - but also trivialise the activities that are most central to the working lives of professional scientists.

The material conditions of school laboratories-and the textbooks and manuals which provide the recipes, models and myths supporting the activities conducted within them-do not lend themselves to critical explorations of the mythic spaces they symbolise. School science education encourages 'hands on', unreflective 'busy work' rather than the kinds of activities through which learners might come to understand science as 'politics continued by other means'. Such activities must include close analysis of the 'cultural texts' of scientific production, including the primary sources of scientific reports, historical accounts of scientific work, the biog­raphies and autobiographies of scientists, scientific journalism in the print and electronic media, representations of science in the fine arts and-perhaps most importantly-science fiction in its myriad forms.

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Exhibit 4: 'Lab Coat - Robe of Innocence or Klansman's Sheet?'

It is the lab coat, literally and symbolically, that wraps the scientist in the robe of innocence - of a pristine and aseptic neutrality - and gives him, like the klansman, a faceless authority that his audience can't challenge. From that sheeted figure comes a powerful, mysterious, impenetrable, coercive anonymous male voice. How do we counter that voice? (Bleier 1986, p.62)

Bleier's comment is nicely illustrated in the graphic novel Animal Man (Morrison et al. 1991), some scenes from which are reproduced below. Note that the scientist's spectacles (drawn as opaque in the top cell) also contribute to his 'mysterious, impenetrable' presence - but that he removes this symbol of detachment and objectivity when, later in the story, he is challenged to tell the truth. This is a savage irony in the light of the mythology of science which alleges that the pursuit of truth is the scientist's most valued aspiration.

Animal Man © 1987 DC Comics Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Indeed, since much of what is presently taught in school science deserves to be treated as history ('Once upon a time there was a man called Isaac Newton who ... ') rather than as propositional knowledge ('Newton's first law of motion is ... '), it can be argued that science education should be centrally concerned with a critique of science as histoire-the French word which means both 'history' and 'story'. In this sense, the keys to understanding science in the contemporary world are not the memorisation of propositional knowledge or induction into 'the scientific method' but, rather, the dispositions and abilities which enable learners to deconstruct and reconstruct the narratives and myths of science. Such an approach is exemplified by Nunan and Homer's (1981) 'social analysis' of selected science fiction texts (see Reading 1). The authors demonstrate that these texts-all of which are well-known and accessible examples of science fiction literature - tell us a great deal about the ways in which science affects individuals as social beings and about how scientific knowledge is constructed from human transactions in particular social settings. Other science fiction novels which are ripe for the kind of social analysis exemplified by Nunan and Homer include Gregory Benford's (1980) Timescape (a realistic novel about scientists at work with a meticulously thought-out scientific premise drawn from recent research on tachyons) and George Turner's (1991) Brain Child (a cautionary tale about genetic engineering). Useful syntheses of the ways in which science and scientists are depicted in science fiction are provided by Dowling (1986), Lambourne et al. (1990), Nicholls (1982) and Parrinder (1990).

Nunan and Homer (1981, pp. 326-7) advocate what they call a 'radical science education' - 'radical in the sense that its values would oppose the present status quo' - but their version of such an education may fall short of transcending the 'mystifying dichotomy' between power and knowledge which science education presently reinforces. For example, the conclusion to their paper reveals the extent to which they have retained some aspects of this dichotomy in their own thinking:

A radical science education ... attempts to educate in and about science in a particular society. An education in science retains much of the 'hard' science of present science texts; indeed, this fundamental element of 'hard science' is central to the kind of education we are proposing. What needs to be stressed is that an education in science should be carried out conjointly with an education about science in a particular society. The emphases should be on both the 'social responsibility' of science and the social roots of scientific thought as the latter interacts with its political, economic, and cultural determinants. Only in that way can the contradiction between science-teaching and the realities of science be disposed of. (1981, p.328)

To suggest that it is meaningful to distinguish between education in science and education about science is troubling enough, but my main concern here is with the suggestion that there is something 'fundamental' and 'central' about aspects of science that can be designated 'hard' (with the implication that other aspects of science may be 'soft'). To do so continues to privilege the subject matters of existing science textbooks and forecloses debate about the contents of science edu­cation curricula. I have no quarrel with the view that, for example, Newtonian mechanics should only be learned and taught within the framework of its social

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history and cultural effects. My objection is to the implication that Newtonian mechanics may constitute a 'fundamental element' of 'hard science' (like all 'hard science', Newtonian mechanics rests on a fundament of , soft' assumptions). In other words, it is not only important to consider how Newtonian mechanics should be taught in a radical science education; we must also consider if, as a body of prop­ositional knowledge, it should be taught at all. Rather than privileging the contents of existing science textbooks, any attempt 'to educate in and about science in a particular society' should treat all of the cultural texts of science equitably. Textbook science, science fiction, science journalism, and all the other myriad representations of science in contemporary society's languages, institutions and media, are cultural expressions of the histoire of science in our society and all are significant resources for science education.

Intermission: political science Before considering the interrelationships between science education and science fiction in more detail, it seems appropriate to use a piece of science fiction to form a conceptual bridge from the above discussion of ' science is politics by other means' to the next section's discussion of educating with science fiction. The following passage is excerpted from George Turner's novel Brain Ch£ld and reports some reminiscences of a retired federal parliamentarian who, while Minister for Science in the early years of the twenty-first century, supported 'Project IQ', an attempt to boost human intelligence by genetic engineering.

If you want to go right back to the starting point you could say that Barry Jones made it possible. You never heard of him, did you? He was a Science Minister with some Labour government back in the eighties, last century, when I was still feeling my way among the shop stewards. Science wasn't a senior portfolio then but this Jones was vocal at a time when science was making itself felt - the Microchip Revolution, IVF and all that - but it was still hard to put across to a public reared on video, booze and football. Not that the MPs were much better. They all had their specialties that mostly didn't matter where policy was concerned but about science they knew bugger all and cared less until it started to stand up and bite them. With this Jones and a couple that came after him pushing at it, the job became more important.

When my time came in 2002 the portfolio was junior only to the PM, the Deputy and the Treasurer. If you think that means I knew any science, forget it. I wanted that job and I worked on the PM till I got it. I didn't need to know science, I had a Department full of brains to do the knowing; I was an administrator and a bloody good one and that was the Department with a big future.

Project IQ was already in the wind when we took government and I had my eye on it for long-term benefits - a big career, a name in the history books and a golden handshake hearty enough to last my life out. And who do you think was the organising mind behind the Extended Span Award? It turned as sour as I knew it would but that didn't harm me any, did it?

In the end I was wrong about Project IQ but we were out of office by then and other people took the blast. But I did all right when we got back into power and the Project fiasco had all blown over, didn't I? You've got to be a survivor, Davey! Anyway, at the start I pushed it for all it was worth and it was me that got it up and running.

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It wasn't all that hard to do. I'd had this pack of geneticists and gene topologists snapping at my heels from the moment I took up the Science portfolio, claiming they had all the variants of the helix charted in the computers, that they'd sorted out the inert sections of the chain and mapped the most promising points of interlocation. They had a list of the micro­surgeons they wanted and a design for the laboratory they wanted, all set to bounce if I could shake the money out of Treasury.

Science was news just then, with the Greenhouse Effect making headlines, and cloning big in the magazine sections, so the great silly public was in the mood for some sort of great leap forward, and what better than super­intelligence in the test tube? Australian test-tube biology had always been a special pride.

The scientific community was onside, except the astronomers, of all people. Did you know there's a high proportion of religious nuts among them, overwhelmed by the majesty of the universe, looking at their computer­enhanced pictures of the sky and thinking they're mapping the face of God? Some of them published an open letter quoting, 'vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself.' I had a secretary who knew his Macbeth so I was able to answer that we'd learned a bit since the witches brewed. That got me a big response from the cartoonists and put the Bible bangers right back in the bag. It did better than that - it put me in the public eye as the big white father of the future. I was in the saddle.

The group I thought would back me by hitting the public in the entertain­ment field-and that's where the ratbag opinions are really formed-was the science fiction writers and fan clubs. Not a bit of it! They didn't like science! It was intrusive, obscure, boring and unimaginative-got in the way of real creativity! I tell you, Davey, in politics you learn something new and silly every day. It makes you wonder how we ever came out of the caves. (1991, pp.56-8)

Through this politician's recollections (he is elsewhere described as a 'vulgarian careerist'), George Turner is clearly having a little fun at the expense of a number of social groups - including science fiction writers and fans. While there is an element of truth in the assertion that many science fiction writers and readers sometimes see science as a barrier to 'real creativity', I believe that it is not so much science per se that they find 'intrusive, obscure, boring and unimaginative' but textbook science-a critical judgment that I suspect many school students would also endorse. As I will now proceed to argue, the science of science fiction is not the same as the fiction that is textbook science, but it may be more meaningful, more interesting and more central to the lives of learners.

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Part 2 Educating with science fiction

As I have demonstrated in the previous section, many representations of science and technology in popular media are situated in what is usually called 'science fiction' in its various print, graphic, audiovisual and electronic forms. In recent years, this field has become known by the more embracing (and more ambiguous) term 'SF'. As Haraway explains:

In the late 1960s science fiction anthologist and critic Judith Merrill idiosyncratically began using the signifier SF to designate a complex emerging narrative field in which boundaries between science fiction (conventionally, sf) and fantasy became highly permeable in confusing ways, commercially and linguistically. Her designation, SF, came to be widely adopted as critics, readers, writers, fans, and publishers struggled to comprehend an increasingly heterodox array of writing, reading, and marketing practices indicated by a proliferation of 'sf phrases: speculative fiction, science fiction, science fantasy, speculative futures, speculative fabulation. (1989, p.5)

I have described elsewhere some of the pleasures oflearning with SF (Gough 1991; see Reading 2). My account is autobiographical and focuses on a small number of specific stories - by Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula Le Guin - which have sig­nificantly influenced my work in curriculum studies and teacher education. It was not written as an argument for using SF but, rather, as an example of its generative potential that might whet readers' appetites and motivate them to undertake their own inquiries. It is also important to note that my account is not intended to dem­onstrate the 'relevance' of SF to the subject matters and methods of conventional school science education. Like Nunan and Homer (1981, p. 317) I do not advocate studying SF for the 'textbook science' it may illustrate: 'To do so would amount to little more than presenting the school-science orthodoxy in a slightly unorthodox way'. Rather, I believe that SF is a conceptual territory in which we can explore ideas and issues that may be more important to us (learners and teachers) than those to be found in conventional science textbooks and classroom practices. For example, in my own case SF has been far more effective than any science teacher or textbook in arousing my curiosity, cultivating a sense of wonder, and helping me to tolerate ambiguity, paradox, uncertainty and indeterminacy.

The significance of SF for understanding science as a cultural phenomenon has

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become increasingly apparent during the last century as the sharp distinction between scientific 'fact' and 'fiction' has been eroded. Contemporary science edu­cators tend to conceive fact and fiction as opposites (see, for example, the titles of the works cited here by Dubeck, Moshier & Boss 1988 and Holman 1985), but it should be noted that they have cultural and linguistic similarities. The ety­mology of 'fact' refers to human action; a fact is the thing done, 'that which actually happened', the Latinjactum being the neuter past participle ofjacere, 'do' (OED). Thus, both fact and fiction refer to human experience, the important difference being that 'fiction' is an active form-the act of fashioning-whereas 'fact' descends from a past participle, a part of speech which disguises the generative act. Facts are testimonies to experience. Scientific facts are testimonies to the experiences of scientists in actively producing facts with their increasingly elaborate technologies of data generation and inscription, their rule-governed practices of interpretation, and their specific traditions of social relationships and organisation. Thus, the oppo­sition offact and fiction in modern science is a fiction - part of a story which ration­alises the strategies used by modern scientists to produce facts. Exposing this fiction is part of the story of postmodern science.

Postmodern science: reconnecting fact and fiction Modern science (beginning with Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo and Newton) was constructed on the assumptions of empiricism and experimentalism. By the middle of the nineteenth century it had come to be typified by Newtonian physics and mathematics and, as Newton had foreseen (and, incidentally, deplored), it was materialistic, deterministic, atomistic and reductionist. Scientists and educators alike assumed that science was chiefly a matter of patiently seeking the 'facts' of nature and accurately reporting them. The breakdown of this assumption was given impetus by a series of events in the physical sciences that began in the late 1880s. Joseph Schwab provides a useful summary of these events and their significance for understanding the scientific enterprise:

The discovery of radioactivity suddenly revealed a world within the world then thought to be the only world. The study of that world and its relations to the world already known led to a revolution in the goals and the structures of physics. By the mid-twenties, this revolution in physics had gone so far that we were faced with the fact that some of the oldest and least questioned of our ideas could no longer be treated as literally true-or literally false. Classical space had been a homogeneous, neutral stage on which the dramas of motion and existence were acted out. The flow of classical time was always and everywhere the same. The mass and length of bodies were each elementary properties independent of other properties. Bodies occupied a definite location and a definite amount of space.

The new physics changed these notions. In its knowledge structure, space was something that could be distorted and its distortions affected bodies in it. The magnitude and position of subatomic particles could not be described as we describe the magnitude and position of a one-inch cube here-now.

But these new assertions did not come about because direct observations of

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space, place, time, and magnitude disclosed that our past views about them were mistaken. Rather, our old assertions about these matters were changed because physicists had found it fruitful to treat them in a new way-neither as self-evident truths nor as matters for immediate empirical verification. They were treated, instead, as principles of inquiry-conceptual structures which could be revised when necessary, in directions dictated by large complexes of theory, diverse bodies of data, and numerous criteria of progress in science.

Today, almost all parts of the subject-matter sciences proceed in this way. A fresh line of scientific research has its origin not in objective facts alone, but in a conception, a deliberate construction of the mind. On this conception, all else depends. It tells us what facts to look for in the research. It tells us what meaning to assign these facts. (1962, p. 198)

Since Schwab wrote these words, the ways in which science is determined by 'deliberate constructions of the mind' have been further amplified and elucidated, particularly with respect to the wider social and cultural determinants of scientific work and the truth claims that emerge from it. In effect, Schwab is describing the emergence of postmodern science - the realisation that many of the percep­tions, interpretations and explanations that constitute 'reality' and our experience of it are not 'facts' (as modern science conceived them) but meanings fashioned by human agents: that is, they are fictions. 'Science' and 'fiction' do not exist in separate domains but are culturally connected. This is not simply a matter of science and literature finding common meeting places in SF and other forms of popular media. Nor is it just a matter of scientific theories being translated into literary themes, a practice which long preceded the emergence of science fiction as a dis­tinctive literary mode (for example, Copernican cosmology permeates the poetry of John Donne and concepts of disease formation are a distinctive feature of Emile Zola's novels). As Hayles (1984, p. 10) demonstrates, 'literature is as much an influence on scientific models as the models are on literature', insofar as there is a two-way traffic in metaphors, analogies and images between them. In recent years, the deep cultural connections between science and literature have been most clearly elucidated through the discourses of poststructural criticism. While poststruc­turalism has obvious origins in literary theory, the cognate interests of post modern scientists (especially those working in the new chaos sciences) have established post structural critical discourses as fertile sites for discussing and investigating both scientific and literary cultures (see also Hayles 1990, 1991).

Poststructuralism Structuralists and poststructuralists share the view that the objects and meanings that constitute our understandings of 'reality' are social constructions-they are not assumed to exist independently of human perception and activity. Poststruc­tural inquiries are concerned, in part, with a refinement and critique of the kinds of stories that structuralists and others have constructed - stories which purport to describe and explain the structures of other stories, including the stories with which we construct our shared understandings of the phenomenal world. Post­structural critics examine the extent to which analyses of narrative constructions are caught up in the processes and mechanisms they are analysing. In Jonathan

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Culler's (1990, p. 4) words, poststructuralists are critical of the view that anyone can get 'outside' a cultural discourse or practice to describe its rules and norms: 'the analytical system or set of categories does not offer a grounded perspective on the phenomena from the outside, but proves rather to be problematically caught up in the processes and functions of the phenomena that it is studying'. Thus, the analytic posture of post structuralism 'is not one of scientific detachment but of intractable involvement'. Poststructuralists are particularly critical of metalanguage-language 'of a higher or second-order kind' (OED). As Culler (1990, p. 4) says, 'any metalanguage turns out to be more language, subject to the forces it claims to be analyzing'.

For example, positivism (a philosophy of science which recognises only 'positive facts' and observable phenomena) can be viewed as an attempt to develop a meta­language of science - a set of rules characterising positive knowledge. The positivist story makes rules for other stories by imposing on them categorical distinctions between analytic and synthetic, linguistic and empirical, observation and theory, and so on. As Cherryholmes (1988, p. 11) writes, structural thought seeks 'ration­ality, linearity, progress and control by discovering, developing, and inventing metanarratives, ... that define rationality, linearity, progress and control', whereas post structural thought is 'skeptical and incredulous about the possibility of such metanarratives'. The poststructural position is that a metanarrative is just another narrative, a social agreement constructed by participants in a particular 'conver­sation'. Metanarratives are as 'incomplete, time-bound, interest-relative, ideologi­cally informed, and shaped by power' as any other narratives (Cherryholmes 1988, p.12).

Post structural criticism has affinities with postanalytic philosophy and with a variety of postmodern movements in the arts, humanities and sciences. Postmodern­isms are characterised by a shared skepticism towards the authority of foundational discourses (sometimes known as 'totalising' discourses because they are intended to be universal in their application). Thus, for example, Schwab's account of the origins of the new physics suggests that the positivist metanarrative no longer guides the practices of post modern scientists (though it may still be evident in their rhetoric). As Michael Polanyi, himself a physical scientist and philosopher, wrote in his Preface to Personal Knowledge:

I start by rejecting the ideal of scientific detachment. In the exact sciences, this false ideal is perhaps harmless, for it is in fact disregarded there by scientists. But ... it exercises a destructive influence in biology, psychology and sociology, and falsifies our whole outlook far beyond the domain of science. (1958, p. vii)

Post modern science tacitly embraces the relatedness of the observer and the observed - the personal participation of the knower in all acts of understanding. By abandoning what Sandra Harding (1986, p. 193) calls 'the longing for "one true story" that has been the psychic motor fof. [modern] Western science', post­modern science has accommodated the ambiguities and uncertainties of quantum mechanics and, more recently, the chaotic 'orderly disorder' of non-linear dynamics,

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fractal geometry and irreversible systems far from equilibrium. Quantum mechanics illustrates some of the characteristic differences between

modern and post modern science. Quantum mechanics is not deterministic: it attributes something like 'free will' to the smallest particles of matter and predicts only probabilities. Quantum mechanics is not atomistic: the universe is not por­trayed as a collection of many small, independent, indivisible particles but as one, whole and indivisible. Furthermore, quantum mechanics suggests that the observer is essential: consciousness is a necessary (and perhaps sufficient) condition for the existence of the universe and we can predict (probabilistically) what occurs only during observations. In between observations, quantum mechanics has nothing to say about the universe. Thus, quantum mechanics is non-realistic in the philosophical sense (realism is the view that observable phenomena are due to some physical reality whose existence is independent of observation). The implications of quantum mechanics for science education are profound: if the observer is a necessary condition for the existence of the universe then to study the universe we must study the observer-that is, ourselves (see exhibit 5: 'Prototaph').

Poststructural criticism -like postmodern science - challenges the legitimacy of those discourses and practices of contemporary science education which are grounded historically in the truth claims of modern science. As presently con­structed, the language of science education privileges the modernist scientific dis­course which lays claim to having access to 'one true story' - to the way things 'really' are. We might do better to adopt the skepticism towards metanarratives that characterises poststructural discourses and act on the kind of understanding of the phenomenal world that is encapsulated in the words of a poster I once saw in an English (language) classroom: 'the universe is not made of atoms-it is made of stories'. Or, as Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984, p. xxiv) puts it: '[postmodern society] falls less within the province of a Newtonian anthropology (such as structuralism or systems theory) than a pragmatics of language particles'.

Laboratories of ideas If science is a kind of storytelling-literally jictio-then what is its relationship to the storytelling which has come to be known as science fiction? Broderick suggests that:

Science fiction, speculative fiction, is the explicitly literary landscape where these issues [of science and technology] are given imaginative form: dressed gaudily in metaphor, mounted on tin starships, sent out to joust against buggy aliens and mind-reading foes which are, finally, the limits of our own constructed knowledge, the fringes of our as-yet-unsayable fears and hopes.

Too often it is an evasion, a retreat to cosy positivism, to the authority of a theology which now worships at the lab bench instead of the altar. Just as often it's a game for children, a different sort of backsliding into an adventure playground. (1987, p. 34)

Like any popular art form, SF ranges widely in quality. But Broderick's descrip­tion of SF at its worst - 'a retreat to cosy positivism' - could equally well apply to the majority of conventional science textbooks (although SF is likely to be a

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Exhibit 5: 'Prototaph' The narrator of Keith Laumer's short story, 'Prototaph', first published in 1966, attempts to buy some life insurance. His application is rejected when he is assessed as being 'unin­surable' by the supposedly infallible supercomputer known as FATE (Federal Actuarial Table Extrapolator). Believing himself to be in good health, he challenges FATE and eventually he and the insurance company officials are told why his application was refused - at which time he is placed into a pampered combination of protective custody and inten­sive care. The final page of a comic version of the story (Laumer & Lere 1989, p. 136), reproduced below, reveals the reason for his treatment. The punchline can be seen as a tongue-in-cheek interpretation of one of the tenets of quantum mechanics, namely, that consciousness is a necessary condition for the existence of the universe: no observer, no universe.

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good deal more entertaining). Even if SF was no more than 'a game for children' it would deserve a place in schooling-an 'adventure playground' that exercises children's minds is no less important than the kind that exercises their bodies. However, as Broderick asserts, SF does much more: it gives 'imaginative form' to 'the limits of our own constructed knowledge'. SF also gives imaginative form to what might lie beyond these limits, beyond 'the fringes of our as-yet-unsayable fears and hopes'. If much SF seems to focus on our fears, this may be an index to the anxieties that have been provoked by modern science and technology (see exhibit 6: 'Organlegging').

While much SF is cautionary, it is also capable of giving form to our hopes. As Teresa de Lauretis writes, SF is

potentially creative of new forms of social imagination, creative in the sense of mapping out areas where cultural change could take place, of envisioning a different sort of order of relationship between people and between people and things, a different conceptualization of social existence, inclusive of physical and material existence. (1980, p. 161)

Examples of such 'new forms of social imagination' can be found in SF stories like Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed (see Nunan & Homer 1981, pp.324-6, Reading 1, for further details) and Always Coming Home (1986). But whereas The Dispossessed deals explicitly with issues of a scientist's social responsibility, in Always Coming Home science and technology are, as it were, 'absent presences'. The setting for Always Coming Home is 'the Valley', an imagined version of California's Napa Valley about 2600 years hence. The cities of the US West Coast have sunk beneath the Pacific or been destroyed by nuclear upheaval. Le Guin does not tell just one story but evokes the complex culture of the Valley by providing samples of its narratives, myths, poetry, ceremonies, medical practices, arts and crafts, music, and so on (the first editions of the novel were profusely illustrated and accompanied by a cassette tape of music and poetry). Le Guin herself, as 'Pandora', sometimes enters the text by simply 'being there' in the Valley while simultaneously main­taining the perspective of our late twentieth century present. In one of these passages Pandora interviews a Valley archivist who asserts that the novel is not a utopia but

a mere dream dreamed up in a bad time, an Up Yours to the people who ride snowmobiles, make nuclear weapons, and run prison camps by a middle-aged housewife, a critique of civilization possible only to the civilised, an affirmation pretending to be a rejection, a glass of milk for the soul ulcered by acid rain ... (1986, p.316)

Le Guin does not explain how the world of Always Coming Home comes about. But she gives the reader clues, bits and hints - an archeology of an imagined future in which industrial sciences and technologies have faded. These are, however, accessed by a vast computer network, the 'City of the Mind', which is peripheral to life in the Valley, being used chiefly for agricultural improvements, weather forecasting and historical study. The Valley dwellers do not value the machine world and have simply turned their backs on it without violence or anger (they

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Exhibit 6: 'Organlegging' Much SF is an imaginitive response to fears generated by scientific and technological 'progress'. For example, 'organleggers' - near-future smugglers of human organs for use in transplant surgery - have appeared in such SF works as Larry Niven's (1975) The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton and the British weekly comic 2000AD. The latter features Judge Dredd, one of the grim unsmiling law enforcers of Mega City One, a vast twenty­second-century metropolis covering the whole eastern seaboard of today's USA. The segment below, from The Chronicles of Judge Dredd (Wagner, Grant & Smith 1985, p. 31), is part of a story dealing with Shanty Town, a 'vast conglomeration containing the flotsam and jetsam of the Apocalypse War', located 'a kilometre beyond Mega City One's west wall' (p. 30). Another strip in which Dredd wrecks an organlegging racket shows the Judge not only searching luggage and clothing but performing investigative surgery: one smuggler is caught with two hearts, six kidneys, three livers, two sets of lungs, a windpipe, two spleens, 28 metres of large intestine and a gallon of blood that are not his own hidden inside his body. Speculations about an illegal trade in human organs were common in news stories immediately following the 1991 murder of Victor Chang, Australia's best known heart transplant surgeon. More recently, the prospects of ' genetic finger-printing', which requires tissue samples to be taken from suspects in criminal cases, can be seen as one small step towards investigative surgery.

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are not, in our terms, Luddites). Science and technology as we know them are not gone from this world view: they are just not seen as important or central to fulfilled human lives. Always Coming Home is a 'laboratory of ideas' in which Le Guin and her readers conduct 'narrative experiments' (Ormiston & Sassower 1989) - experiments which generate conceptual models of alternative futures in which, for example, 'big science' and industrialised technologies are not the prime determinants of'relationship[s] between people and between people and things' (see exhibit 7: 'Scrub Oak').

At this point it may be worth noting that the narrative strategies of SF are not uncommon in 'real' science. Newtonian mechanics is very plausible in imagined worlds-for example, the formula determining force by reference to mass and acceleration (F= ma) is most easily demonstrated in frictionless space. Similarly, in the 1930s, Albert Einstein defended realism and relativity against the paradoxi­cal truth claims of quantum mechanics by means of a 'thought experiment' - an experiment which so 'obviously' had the outcome he wanted that it did not actually require anyone to perform it. Einstein's strategy was persuasive: nearly thirty years elapsed before other physicists went to the trouble of uncovering his unstated assumptions and used them to predict the outcomes of feasible experiments which could be compared with the outcomes predicted by quantum mechanics. Many physicists interpret the results of these experiments as being decisively in favour of quantum mechanics. But I am less concerned here with whether or not Einstein was 'right' than with the ways in which he exercised discursive authority in the community of physicists. In effect, Einstein sustained doubt in the explanatory power of quantum mechanics (for many years and among many colleagues) with no more, and no less, than a 'thought experiment' - a plausible story (for a more detailed discussion of the narrative strategies found in science and science fiction see Broderick 1989; Ormiston & Sassower 1989).

SF often registers new scientific knowledge (and speculates on its consequences) long before it is recognised by the general public-and even longer before it is registered in textbook science. For example, in The Time Machine, H. G. Wells (1895) acknowledges the existence of non-Euclidean geometries and suggests a relationship between space and time that appears, in retrospect, to anticipate the Einstein-Minkowski notion ofa space-time continuum. Wells was clearly abreast of the scientific debates of his era and the Time Traveller's opening remarks include an assertion that remains pertinent to this day: 'The geometry . . . they taught you at school is founded on a misconception'. The limitations of Euclidean geometry were well known to nineteenth-century mathematicians, yet, nearly a century later, few school children have been taught that Euclid's geometry is only one among many possible geometries. By the late nineteenth century there was growing interest among mathematicians in the abstract geometry of four (and more) dimensions, yet this was not reflected in popular or school texts. As Richard Costa (1967, p. 32) writes: 'For a generation yet to hear of Albert Einstein, the opening pages of The Time Machine provided an introduction to the possibilities of the Fourth Dimen­sion which in 1895 was not elsewhere available outside scientific journals' (for further details of the science and mathematics of The Time Machine, see Geduld 1987).

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Exhibit 7: 'Scrub Oak' In this passage from Always Coming Home, Ursula Le Guin 'finds a way into the Valley through the Scrub Oak'. In so doing she captures some differences between the imagined worldviews of the Valley people and presently dominant ways of apprehending nature. Many of the statements in this passage (such as: 'You don't count scrub oaks. When you count them, something has gone wrong.' and 'This thing is wilderness. The civilised human mind's relation to it is imprecise, fortuitous, and full of risk. There are no shortcuts.') offer critical perspectives on modern scientific techniques of observing and interpreting nature.

Look how messy this wilderness is. Look at this scrub oak, chaparro, the chaparral was named for it and consists of it mixed up with a lot of other things, but look at this shrub of it right here now . . . A lot of the smaller branch-ends look broken or bitten off. Maybe deer browse the leafbuds. The little grey branches and twigs grow every which way, many dead and lichened, crossing each other, choking each other out. Digger-pine needles, spiders' threads, dead bay leaves are stuck in the branches. It's a mess. It's littered. It has no overall shape. Most of the stems come up from one area, but not all; there's no center and no symmetry. A lot of sticks sticking up out of the ground a little ways with leaves on some of them . .. The leaves themselves show some order, they seem [0 obey some laws, poorly. They are all different sizes .. . but each is enough like the others that one could generalise an ideal scrub­oak leaf: a dusty, medium dark-green color, with a slight convex curve to the leaf, which pillows up a bit between the veins that run slanting outward from the central vein; and the edge is irregularly serrated, with a title spine at each apex. These leaves grow irregularly spaced on alternate sides of their twig up to the top, where they crowd into a bunch, a sloppy rosette. Under the litter of dead leaves, its own and others', and moss and rocks and mold and junk, the shrub must have a more or less shrub-shaped complex of roots, going fairly deep, probably deeper than it stands aboveground, because wet as it is here now in February, it will be bone dry on this ridge in summer. There are no acorns left from last fall,

if this shrub is old enough to have borne them. It probably is. It could be two years old or twenty or who knows? It is an oak, but a scrub oak, a low oak, a no-account oak, and there are at least a hundred very much like it in sight from this rock I am sitting on, and there are hundreds and thou­sands and hundreds of thousands more on this ridge and the next ridge, but numbers are wrong. They are in error. You don't count scrub oaks. When you count them, something has gone wrong. You can count how many in a hundred square yards and multiply, if you're a botanist, and so make a good estimate, a fair guess, but you cannot count the scrub oaks on this ridge, let alone the ceanothus, buckbrush, or wild lilac, which I have not mentioned, and the other vari­ously messy and humble components of the chaparral. The chaparral is like atoms and the components of atoms: it evades. It is innumerable. It is not accidentally but essentially messy. This shrub is not beautiful, nor even if I were ten feet high on. hashish would it be mystical . . . This thing is nothing to do with us. This thing is wilderness. The civilised human mind's relation to it is imprecise, for­tuitous, and full of risk. There are no shortcuts. All the analogies run one direction, our direction ... Analogies are easy: the live oak, the humble evergreen, can certainly be made into a sermon, just as it can be made into firewood. Read or burnt. Senna, I read; I read scrub oak. But I don't, and it isn't here to be read, or burnt . It is casting a shadow across the page of this notebook in the weak sunshine of three-thirty of a February after­noon in Northern California. When I close the book and go, the shadow

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will not be on the page, though I have drawn a line around it; only the pencil line will be on the page. The shadow will then be on the dead-Ieaf­thick messy ground or on the mossy rock ... and the shadow will move lawfully and with great majesty as the earth rurns. The mind can imagine that shadow of a few leaves falling in the wilderness; the mind is a won­derful thing. But what about all the shadows of all the other leaves on all the other branches on all the other scrub oaks on all the other ridges of all the wilderness? If you could imagine those even for a moment, what good would it do? Infinite good.

Ursula Le Guin, Always Coming Home, 1986, pp.239-41.

Illustration by Margaret Chodos from Always Coming Home

Many accounts of the relationship between 'real' science and SF are overly con­cerned with demonstrating the wisdom of their own hindsight. For example, in The Science in Science Fiction, Peter Nicholls (1982) catalogues the various ways in which particular works of SF can be seen, in retrospect, to have accurately predicted developments in science and technology; he is also concerned to dem­onstrate 'where science fiction gets it wrong' (Nicholls 1982, p. 190). But from the point of view of science education, it may be more important to attend to the subject matters about which SF speculates than to the accuracy or otherwise of its predictions.

As I have already argued, one of the purposes of science education is to represent science as a form of knowledge in the curriculum. Lawrence Stenhouse provides a useful description of what such a representation entails:

... a form of knowledge has structure, and it involves procedures, concepts and criteria. Content can be selected to exemplify the most important procedures, the key concepts and the areas and situations in which the criteria hold.

Now it might be thought that this is to designate procedures, concepts and criteria as objectives to be learned by the students. This strategy ... would, I believe, distort the curriculum. For the key procedures, concepts and criteria in any subject-cause, form, experiment, tragedy-are, and are important precisely because they are, problematic within the subject. They are the focus of speculation, not the object of mastery. (1975, p.85)

Many of the concepts that are 'problematic' and 'the focus of speculation' in science at any given time cannot be found in the textbook science of the day-but it is more than likely that they will be among the foci of speculation incorporated into contemporaneous works of SF. Thus, for example, part of the educative value of The Time Machine in its day was that it gave imaginative form to concepts that were deeply problematic and key foci of speculation among late-Victorian scien­tists and mathematicians, such as the space-time relationship, entropy and evolution-concepts that were not addressed by late-Victorian schooling. In a similar fashion, much of the textbook science of today is concerned with the kind of subject matter that is amenable to being treated as an 'object of mastery', such as stipu­lative definitions and relatively secure and stable propositions and 'laws'. It is left to science journalism and SF to provide public access to the problematic concepts which are presently the foci of speculation for working scientists. Apart from the journals in which reports of current scientific research are published, science journalism and SF are key sites for exploring the conceptual territories that mark out the 'leading edges' of science, whereas textbook science seems to be chiefly concerned with the trailing edges of scientific inquiry. For example, Goswami (1983) refers to more than seventy SF novels and short stories which incorporate discus­sions and interpretations of such significant concepts and speculations in twentieth­century physics and astronomy as antimatter, black holes, entropy, negentropy, quantum paradoxes, relativity, tachyons, wave phenomena, Bell's theorem, de Broglie wavelength, the Drake equation, the Dyson sphere, Hubble's law and Schrodinger's cat.

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A recent example of SF embodying the leading edges of scientific speculation is provided by the emergence of chaos theory as a theme in SF. Chaos theory, as developed by Belgian thermodynamicist Ilya Prigogine during the 1960s and 1970s, explains how complex, far-from-equilibrium systems spontaneously trans­form themselves into new levels of complex organisation. Prigogine's model of self-organising systems as 'dissipative structures' appears to reconcile a number of deeply problematic contradictions in twentieth-century science, including the very different models of physical function provided by entropy versus evolution, and the different roles and attributes of time in microscopic physics and macro­scopic biology. The profound cosmological implications ofPrigogine's work were quickly recognised and he received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1977. However, his work was not published in English in any popular form until 1984 when Order Out of Chaos (Prigogine & Stengers 1984) was translated from the French. Stories about chaos began to appear in the popular press during the mid-1980s (e.g. Atkinson 1985; Strauss 1985), at about the same time as its application to edu­cational issues was beginning to be explored (e.g. Sawada & Caley 1985; DoUI986). The mass popularisation of chaos theory was provided by James Gleick's (1987) bestselling book, Chaos: The Making of a New Science.

With this chronology of chaos theory's public dissemination in mind, it is easy to agree with David Porush when he writes:

... it is a tribute to the general intuition of SF, and in particular the long­distance imaginative radar shown by A. A. Attanasio, that in his extravagant and lavishly-imagined tour de force, Radix, Prigogine's theories make a crucial, if cameo, appearance. Attanasio must have seized very quickly upon Prigogine's work ... in order to have abstracted some of its essential implications ... in a novel that was published as early as 1981. (1991, p.372)

Other SF writers to give imaginative form to Prigogine's work are Bruce Sterling (1986, 1990), Lewis Shiner (1988), William Gibson (Gibson & Sterling 1991) and the graphic novelist Alan Moore (Moore et a1. 1987; Moore & Sienkiewicz 1990). The point I want to emphasise here is that while Prigogine's thinking has promoted highly original interdisciplinary work in astrophysics, biology, biophysics, chemistry, ecology, economics, education, management, neurology, particle physics, ther­modynamics and traffic studies, it has had little or no effect on 'textbook science' and school science curricula. Yet many ofPrigogine's ideas and their applications can be accessed immediately through SF.

For example, in Watchmen (Moore et a1. 1987), a dark satire on superhero myth­ologies and US politics, one central character is the aptly named Dr Manhattan, a towering (and blue-skinned!) physicist with superhuman qualities. Dr Manhattan is the reincarnation of a nuclear scientist who is materially 'deconstruct ed' when he is accidentally irradiated by sub-atomic particles. The novel's representation of the scientist's reconstruction involves two intertwining-and contradictory­metaphors. One metaphor is borrowed explicitly from Einstein's rueful reflection on his role in the release of atomic energy: 'if only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker'. The scientist repairs a friend's watch a short time before his demise, and his reconstruction is depicted as 'just a question of reassembling

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the components in the correct sequence'. But other visual and verbal cues (not all of which are apparent in the sequence shown here) suggest that his transform­ation can itself be conceived as a metaphor of chaos. That is, the scientist's disas­sembled particles can be interpreted as a chaotic system, a dissipative structure which spontaneously reorganises itself at a higher level of complexity represented by Dr Manhattan's superhuman powers (see exhibit 8: 'Dr Manhattan: Order out of Chaos?'). Thus, Dr Manhattan's ambiguous genesis can be seen to symbolise the contesting paradigms of modern and postmodern science - of deterministic mechanics (Newton's 'clockwork universe') versus the unpredictable dynamics of chaotic self-organising systems.

Another SF novel which incorporates chaos theory in significant ways is Lewis Shiner's (1988) Deserted Cities of the Heart. The central character is Thomas, an anthropologist investigating 'the application of Ilya Prigogine's dissipative struc­tures to the Mayan collapse, circa 900 a.d.' (Shiner 1988, p. 24). Prigogine's theories provide numerous images and metaphors throughout the story. In a key passage, Thomas throws pebbles into a pond beneath a waterfall:

The turbulence made them dance, two steps to the right, up for a second, then spinning off sideways and down. Waterfalls were very big in Chaos Theory, of which Prigogine's and Thomas' own work were just a part. According to classical physics the patterns should be predictable, because everything that went into them was quantifiable. Volume of water, depth of streambed, angle of gradient, everything. But the patterns were like living organisms, influenced by their own history and their reactions to each other, and they could never be nailed down.

What does this tell us, he thought? (1988, pp. 146-7)

This unanswered question exemplifies to some extent the speculations of contem­porary chaos scientists. As contextualised in this particular SF story, it is a question equally open to conjecture by learners in school science education. At the moment, such stories are one of the few ways in which the characteristics and possible impli­cations of chaos theory can be explored by young learners (for a more detailed discussion of the links between chaos and SF, see Porush 1991). Furthermore, harking back to the theme of this section, distinctions between 'fact' and 'fiction' are irrelevant when considering the above passage's merits as a 'focus of specu­lation'. Indeed, embedding chaos concepts in an explicit fiction (rather than in the fiction that masquerades as fact in science textbooks), may make it more likely that the concepts will be treated as foci of speculation rather than as objects of mastery.

Using SF to deconstruct science: Haraway's primatology The insights which can emerge from a deliberate blurring of distinctions between science and literature, fact and fiction, are shown to advantage in Primate Visions, Donna Haraway's critical history of the development and cultural effects of prima­tology. The introduction to Primate Visions is subtitled 'the persistence of vision', and it is no coincidence that this is also the title of a story by John Varley (1978).

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Exhibit 8: 'Dr Manhattan: Order out of Chaos?' In Watchmen (Moore, Gibbons & Higgins 1987, chapter 4, pp. 7-10), the superhuman Dr Manhattan is a reincarnation of a nuclear research scientist who is 'taken to pieces' in a laboratory accident. Two contradictory metaphors attend his reconstruction. On the one hand he is seen to be reassembled in an orderly fashion (like repairing a watch) but, on the other hand, there are visual and verbal cues which suggest that his metamorphosis involves the transformation of a dissipative structure - a spontaneous reorganisation at a higher level of complexity.

.' -,/

--- j - --J .. . I

.- -

" . ".

'. . ...

_.t' .....

Watchmen © 1987 DC Comics Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Watchmen © 1987 DC Comics Inc . All Rights Reserved.

39

r MEAN, I I:>EMEM8EQ W"EN OUR CAROL-ANNE 5TA'Z"rED 5T1Cl{IN' UP PICTUQE5 01= THAT I'IM.PY·

EVED ~/N6ER, THAT PUNK PfilESlEY ...

Watchmen © 1987 DC Comics Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Haraway writes:

John Varley's science fiction short story, 'The persistence of vision', is part of the inspiration for Primate Visions. In the story, Varley constructs a utopian community designed and built by the deaf-blind. He then explores these people's technologies and other mediations of communication and their relations to sighted children and visitors ... The interrogation of the limits and violence of vision is part of the politics of learning to revision. (1989, p.384)

Haraway exposes the 'violence' that arises from the relationship between our vision-what, how, why, who, when and where we choose to see-and those others (human, animal) who are the subjects and objects of (and who are subjected to and objectified by) our vision. In primatology, as in other disciplines, this violence is both literal and symbolic. As Haraway (1989, p. 1) notes, 'the commercial and scientific traffic in monkeys and apes is a traffic in meanings, as well as in animal lives'. Some of these meanings bear 'the terrible marks of gender and race' (p. 1), because primatology has been a particularly important legitimating discipline for patriarchal, Eurocentric and anthropocentric mythologies. Haraway is thus con­cerned to elucidate the ways in which the story-telling practices of science, as exemp­lified by primatology, 'structure scientific vision' and, in turn, construct myths of gender, race and nature in our culture.

Looking at primatology, a branch of the life sciences, as a story-telling craft may be particularly appropriate. First, the discourse of biology, beginning near the first decades of the nineteenth century, has been about organisms, beings with a life history; i.e., a plot with structure and function ... Biology is the fiction appropriate to objects called organisms; biology fashions the facts 'discovered' from organic beings. Organisms perform for the biologist, who transforms that performance into a truth attested by disciplined experience; i.e., into a fact, the jointly accomplished deed or feat of the scientist and the organism ... Both the scientist and the organism are actors in a story-telling practice.

Second, monkeys, apes, and human beings emerge in primatology inside elaborate narratives about origins, natures, and possibilities. Primatology is about the life history of a taxonomic order that includes people. Especially western people produce stories about primates while simultaneously telling stories about the relations of nature and culture, animal and human, body and mind, origin and future. Indeed, from the start, in the mid-eighteenth century, the primate order has been built on tales about these dualisms and their scientific resolution (Haraway 1989, pp.4-5).

Many of the 'narratives about origins, natures, and possibilities' to which Haraway refers are sustained by popular media, such as the numerous film and video documentaries about Jane Goodall's work with chimpanzees and various versions of the life and death of Dian Fossey (as in the movie, Gorillas in the Mist 1988). Another recent example is provided by William Boyd's popular novel, Brazzaville Beach (1991), in which the central characters are scientists undertaking field studies of chimpanzees. Science fiction has also produced many primate stories. For example, the Morlocks in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine are described as an 'ape-like' evolutionary 'degeneration' of humans and were inspired, in part, by a

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picture of a gorilla in an illustrated book of natural history which Wells read when he was seven (see Geduld 1987, p. 2). Wells (1934, p. ix) describes The Time Machine as 'a glimpse of the future that ran counter to the placid assumption of that time [the late Victorian era] that Evolution was a pro-human force making things better and better for mankind [sic]'. In similar ways, monkeys and apes have inspired numerous images of human fears-including fears of what humans might become­in SF stories and movies (see exhibit 9: 'Primate Images').

The inspiration of Varley's SF story explicitly foreshadows one of the ways in which Haraway (1989, p. 5) 'reads' primatology, that is, 'as science fiction, where possible worlds are constantly reinvented in the contest for very real, present worlds'.

I am interested in the narratives of scientific fact - those potent fictions of science-within a complex field indicated by the signifier SF ...

SF is a territory of contested cultural reproduction in high-technology worlds. Placing the narratives of scientific fact within the heterogeneous space of SF produces a transformed field. The transformed field sets up resonances among all of its regions and components. No region or component is 'reduced' to any other, but reading and writing practices respond to each other across a structured space. Speculative fiction has different tensions when its field also contains the inscription practices that constitute scientific fact. The sciences have complex histories in the constitution of imaginative worlds and of actual bodies in modern and postmodern 'first world' cultures. (Haraway 1989, p. 5)

By using SF as a conceptual 'lens' through which to read the primatology story, Haraway demonstrates the effectiveness of a learning strategy that was described by Marshall McLuhan in the following terms:

Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing old categories-for probing around. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result. (1967, p.l0)

'Ibe results of adopting such a strategy are particularly apparent in the final chapter of Pn'rnate Visions (see Reading 3) which alternates between 'reading primatology as science fiction' and 'reading science fiction as primatology' (pp. 368, 376). Haraway begins this chapter by using Isaac Asimov's The Second Foundation (1964) to recapitulate the themes of Primate Visions. She then reviews the work of several women SF writers in the light of her recon­structed narratives of primatology. Haraway reasons that:

Mixing, juxtaposing, and reversing reading conventions appropriate to each genre can yield fruitful ways of understanding the production of origin narratives in a society that privileges science and technology in its constructions of what may count as nature and for regulating the traffic between what it divides as nature and culture. (1989, p. 370)

Primate Visions testifies to the potential effectiveness of SF in helping to decon­struct and demystify contemporary orthodoxies - in this case, the social, textual and material history of primatology. Clearly, SF has mediated Haraway's own learning in important ways. The kind oflearning that Haraway models in Primate

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Exhibit 9: 'Primate Images' In SF, monkeys and apes are prototypical images for modelling a wide range of human fears and hopes. Primatology has nurtured many cultural myths about what it means to be 'almost human'. Images of past and future humans, near humans and aliens draw upon these myths. For example (clockwise from top left): a 'blue Mercurian' (from an illustra­tion in Amazing Stories 1951); the tragic giant ape of the movie King Kong (1933); a Morlock (from a 1950 magazine illustration for H. G. Wells's The Time Machine); 'civilised' simians and a 'primitive' human in the movie Planet of the Apes (1968).

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Visions is as applicable to school science education as it is to research in the history and philosophy of primatology. In my experience, school students require little encouragement to mix and juxtapose the narratives of'scientific fact' with the nar­ratives of science fiction. Indeed, they may be more willing than their teachers to mix and juxtapose these 'seemingly disparate elements' in critical and creative ways. The difficulty for science teachers is that many seem to have cast them­selves in roles as 'defenders of the faith' - defenders of the privileged status of science and technology-rather than 'understanders' of the myths, narratives and rituals which constitute science and technology in the contemporary world.

'Into the future I this nervous game': SF and young people In discussing the work of Donna Haraway, and other postmodernists for whom SF is generative and inspirational, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay (1991a, p. 308) argues that 'SF has ceased to be a genre of fiction per se, becoming instead a mode of awareness about the world, a complex, hesitating orientation toward the future' (see also Csicsery-Ronay 1991 b). It is a mode of awareness which finds expression in a variety of young people's media, as can be heard in the words of a popular song (Seymour 1987) performed by the group Hunters and Collectors:

And everyday I hear the sound Of running feet 'cross the open ground Into the future this nervous game We'll always circle around the flame

Many adults have an intense dislike for the kinds of SF that are popular with young people, as evidenced by the well-publicised debates over the virtues and vices of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In criticising such works, adults are questioning not only the quality of these media but also young people's taste and judgment. As I have argued elsewhere (Gough 1988, 1989a, 1990; see also Beavis & Gough 1991), many adult understandings of young people's imaginative lives - especially in regard to their allegedly pessimistic attitudes to the future-are condescending and patronising. Adults should at least be prepared to entertain the possibility that the pathology they are investigating is not situated in popular media or chil­dren's minds but, rather, in their own failure to transcend (or even attempt to transcend) the adult myths and stereotypes which frame their judgments. Young people may be attracted to SF because its 'complex, hesitating orientation toward the future' is hospitable to their sense of moving 'into the future / this nervous game'. I will explore this proposition, and its implications for science education, by reference to four kinds of SF:

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• cyborg cinema, • graphic novels, • feminist SF, and • children's SF.

Teenage mutant cyborg cinema Science educators frequently portray popular media as sites of fantasy or 'incor­rect' science. Thus, a common use of SF movies in science education is to encourage students to identifY 'violations' of scientific principles in them. For example, Holman (1985, p.38) is concerned with 'misconceptions' like the 'loud explosions heard in a vacuum' in Star Wars (1977) and Dubeck, Moshier and Boss (1988, p. x) devote a whole book to exposing 'pseudoscience' in more than thirty SF movies. Such readings constitute very narrow interpretations of these media and implicitly devalue their educative potential by suggesting that SF is in some way deficient unless it illustrates 'correctly' the 'one true story' of modern science. This obscures the sense in which particular works of SF function as critical and creative probes of issues in science, technology and society that are seen to be problematic by those who create and consume them.

Many examples of the most recent wave of popular SF movies feature mutants (e.g. Total Recall 1990) and cyborgs (e.g. RoboCop 1987, Terminator 1984 and their respective sequels). These movies can be interpreted as speculative recon­ceptualisations of what it means to be human in a world of increasingly intrusive technological mediations. The popularity of these movies among teenagers may be a reflection of young people's curiosity about questions that are significant to them - questions that also merit the serious attention of science educators. In my experience, students who have watched the RoboCop and Terminator movies are far more interested in discussing their attitudes to (and anxieties about) various aspects of biotechnology (including bionic organs, organ donation and organ trans­plants) than in considering the scientific or technical plausibility of the phenomena these films depict.

SF movies are trivialised by being used merely as resources for games of 'spot the scientific misconception'. Many of the most popular and critically acclaimed SF movies exemplify Haraway's proposition (quoted above) that 'SF is a territory of contested cultural reproduction in high-technology worlds'. The task for teachers and learners alike is to explore and elucidate the contested meanings that each movie generates. For example, writing of Blade Runner (1982) (arguably the most challenging cyborg movie to date), McKenzie Wark suggests that

... it raises the possibility that the difference between the human and the inhuman, between culture and technology, is too far gone to be unscrambled. There can be no naIve appeals to 'human nature' or a return to nature when the human is a product of the technical as much, if not more, than vice versa [sic]. (1991, p. 52)

Sarah Franklin concludes that cyborg cinema, as represented by the RoboCop (1987,

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1990) and Alien (1979, 1986) series and Total Recall, depicts 'the turbulence of post modernity' :

To participate as a spectator in these mutant cyborg plots is to view the postmodern condition depicted in celluloid. If this condition denotes a loss of certainty, a collapse of the once taken-for-granted foundations of modern society (such as the belief in progress, particularly scientific and technological progress), a blurring of the fundamental boundaries through which the world was once classified (such as the distinction between humans and machines), then films such as RoboCop 2 are definitely postmodern. As such they represent an exploration of what becomes thinkable in the wake of rapid technological innovation, what is threatened by technological change, or what is possible in imagined high-tech future societies. But they also constitute a significant renegotiation of the power and the meaning of science and technology in relation to certain age-old and fundamental questions such as what it means to be human. (1990, p. 71)

If teachers are to use such movies as foci for non-trivial classroom learning, they need to be tolerant, open-minded and responsive. These qualities are evident in Julie Faulkner's account of how, as an English teacher, she 'put Shakespeare on hold and learned to love Arnold Schwarzenegger':

I was discussing the notion of an author playing a literary game with the reader in my Year 12 English class. I mentioned one or two stories which did this and invited comment on the technique. Several of my boys asked me if I had seen Total Recall, currently a very popular Arnold Schwarzenegger video. When I laughed at the suggestion, my condemnatory response was quickly quashed by the statement that the film dealt with a number of levels of perceived reality and the viewer was left in a quandary over whether what she thought had happened, had in fact happened. I should see it, I was told, I'd like it.

Well, I didn't. But in the process of viewing, a new perception emerged. It struck me that what I was doing in that class, and indeed all my classes to date, was typical of what most teachers do; by peremptorily dismissing the ideas contained in popular culture, we are imposing a fixed and narrow notion of what is considered 'worthy' for our students. After an enthusiastic debate on the tensions between good and evil in Blade Runner, I tossed in the idea that perhaps we should teach Blade Runner instead of Macbeth. This was met with mixed enthusiasm by my cyberpunk devotees; they wanted both. And why not? (1991, p. 1)

The films to which Faulkner refers pose questions that merit exploration in science and technology studies as well as English. For example, Total Recall deals with the possibility of artificial memory. The Schwarzenegger character, despite his considerable physical prowess, is so controlled by the techno-conglomerate that dominates the mining colonies and economy of Mars that he is frequently unable to distinguish synthetic 'reality' from anything else or, indeed, one synthetic reality from another. The questions that are raised for science education do not concern the plausibility or probability of the kind of memory control imagined in the film. Rather, such questions should be concerned in part with identifying the present circumstances and conditions (including relevant theoretical and technical knowledge) which make the events portrayed in Total Recall even thinkable. Most importantly, who presently has power over and control of these circumstances, con-

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ditions, know ledges and technologies? How is this power exercised? What safeguards exist against irresponsible uses of this power? What does it mean to be 'respon­sible' or 'irresponsible' in the circumstances and conditions made possible by these new know ledges and technologies?

One difficulty with using some of the most popular examples of cyborg cinema in classrooms is the high frequency of R-rated ianguage and violence in them (although many such movies are also available in M-rated versions, as modified for television). For example, despite being labelled 'action/comedy', the slip-case of the RoboCop 2 video elaborated on its R-rating by acknowledging its 'very frequent violence' and 'assaultive coarse language'. In part, this is because cyborg cinema has complex origins not only in SF but in male-orientated fantasies of power, heroics and domination: thus, for example, RoboCop is an amalgam of heroes and fabula­tions including Frankenstein's monster, the Tin Man (from The Wizard of Oz 1939), John Wayne, Dirty Harry and Rambo.

My own view is that watching such movies in full is an out-of-school activity and therefore is entirely a matter for students and their parents: classroom time is too limited to be used for showing feature-length films. However, selected segments of SF videos can be presented in class and supplemented by print media which provide a context for them. For example, Blade Runner is based on Philip K. Dick's (1968) novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Total Recall is adapted from the same author's short story, 'We can remember it for you whole­sale' (in Dick 1990). These stories are not as violent as their movie equivalents, nor do they contain the kind of dialogue that some audiences find offensive. Like much SF cinema, the Terminator and RoboCop movies are also available in 'graphic novel' (comic book) versions which, because segments can be readily reproduced or displayed as overhead projector transparencies, are a particularly suitable medium for classroom use.

There are also a number of juvenile SF movies which explore similar themes to the ado1escent- or adult-orientated films mentioned above. For example, Short Circuit (1985), about a military robot that comes to 'life', and Project X (1987), which focuses on the plight of chimpanzees in a military research facility, are delightful family entertainment. These movies have strong parallels with cyborg cinema through their use of'a1most human' central characters. They raise profound issues about anima1-human-machine interrelationships in ways that young audiences can readily comprehend (however, like adult movies, the quality of juvenile SF cinema is extremely variable: for example, while Short Circuit is cen­trally concerned with contested views of human responsibility for the products of human invention, its sequel, Short Circuit 2 (1989), is a routine action -comedy­the robot 'hero' foils would-be jewe11ery thieves-in which such issues are virtu­ally ignored). Another G-rated film, The Right Stuff (1985), a 'docudrama' about the first US space program, presents some striking images of what Haraway (1989, p. 138) ca11s 'cyborg neonates' - the telemetrically implanted chimps who made Earth-orbital flights in the Mercury spacecraft prior to human astronauts (for a more detailed discussion of cyborgs as both 'a myth and a tool' see Haraway 1989, pp.136-9; 1991, pp. 149-81).

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Graphic novels Graphic novels are among the most intriguing, adventurous and challenging forms of popular media to have evolved in recent years. Writers and graphic artists have collaborated in reconceiving or rejecting the formulaic monsters, superhero myth­ologies and other conventions of the comic book and, instead, have fashioned ingenious and complex narratives of two enduring human quests: the struggle for survival and the search for meaning in existence. Comics have always had a strong science fictional dimension. Most superheroes are either aliens (Superman), tech­nology buffs (Batman) or mutants whose superpowers are the result of laboratory accidents (the Incredible Hulk, the Flash). The myth of a mutant or monster produced in a laboratory - either by accident or design - has long been a dominant theme of SF, with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (first published in 1818) providing an archetypal example (see also exhibit 10: 'DNAgents'). As with the protagonists of cyborg movies, the mutated superhero is a product of deep cultural concerns about the social repercussions of developments in science and technology.

Alan Moore's ground-breaking graphic novel Watchmen (Moore, Gibbons & Higgins 1987) has already been mentioned for its evocations of chaos theory (see exhibit 7). Watchmen is complex and convoluted, full of conceptual twists and allusions that belie the superficial crudeness of its comic book format. One reviewer (Gilmore 1990, p. 54) calls it a 'masterwork ... [of] astute political analysis and a peerless thriller ... To read it [is] to understand the power and depth that this renascent art form [can] yield'. Another critic calls it

a superlative feat of imagination, combining sci-fi [sic], political satire, knowing evocations of comics past and bold reworkings of current graphic formats ... It is as engagingly knotty and self-referential as The Name of the Rose, but instead of monks doubting their faith, here are superheroes weighed down by their creed, caught in a world they never made but that is remaking them, and showing no mercy. (Cocks 1988, p. 63)

Watchmen also has a strong vein of sharp satire and is embellished with some delight­fully tongue-in-cheek fictional artefacts. For example, the Nightowl (one of the retired masked vigilantes on whose exploits the novel is focused) is also an amateur ornithologist and the novel includes a 'reprint' of an article he has written for the Journal of the American Ornithological Society which begins:

Is it possible, I wonder, to study a bird so closely, to observe and catalogue its peculiarities in such minute detail, that it becomes invisible? Is it possible that while fastidiously calibrating the span of its wings or the length of its tarsus, we somehow lose sight of its poetry? ... I believe that we do. I believe that in approaching our subject with the sensibilities of statisticians and dissectionists, we distance ourselves increasingly from the marvelous and spell-binding planet of imagination whose gravity drew us to our studies in the first place.

In its entirety, the mock scholarship of the Nightowl's article (and it mocks a mul­tiplicity of subjects including itself, science, and the discursive forms it both criti­cises and emulates) stands as a lucid critique of identifying-naming-collecting-

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Exhibit 10: 'DNAgents' DNAgents is yet another contribution to the mythology oflaboratory-crafted superheroes: 'It took five years to grow them ... five years and umpteen billion dollars. Finally, there came the day when they were ready ... sort of (Evanier et a1. 1983, p. 1). As one of the scientists who creates them says, the DNA gents 'look human, they act human ... but the deoxyribonucleic acid codes have been altered just enough to make them more than human: the perfect special agents . . .' (p. 1; emphases in original). The DNAgents are crude stereotypes of the Frankenstein myth and their adventures rarely transcend comic-strip cliches and conventions. However, there is some interest for science educators in a subplot which explores some of the problems that arise when scientists and technologists fail to consider - and take moral responsibility for - the consequences of their discoveries and inventions. As with many contemporary explorations of this theme, the chief villains are the unscrupulous chief executives of the megacorporation in whose laboratories the DNA gents were produced.

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measuring-classiFying-dissecting approaches to bird-watching (and other 'scientific' studies of the natural world). Moreover, unlike a 'real' journal article, it is written in language which is accessible to the young people who are among the prime audience of graphic novels like Watchmen.

Animal Man (Morrison et a1. 1991) is another graphic novel which drastically revises superhero myths as it chronicles the fortunes and misfortunes of a some­times zealous, sometimes self-doubting animal-rights activist with the power to take on the characteristics of animals with whom he comes into contact. Animal Man is a rich blend of ancient and modern myths and postmodern critical dis­courses. The first four issues rework the conventions of superhero comics to tell a sinister tale of the moral corruption of modern scientists' labours by the interests of the capitalist military-industrial complex (see exhibit 4). These are followed by a particularly thought-provoking episode, 'The coyote gospel', which reinter­prets one of the most powerful native American creation myths in postmodern terms. Later issues introduce a native American physicist through whom further connections between premodern narratives and postmodern science and com­munications technologies are explored (see exhibit 11: 'Animal Man').

The popular success of Watchmen and Animal Man in their original comic book form testifies to the critical sophistication of their prime audiences of 10-14 year olds (comics usually have to achieve regular high monthly sales before they are transformed into graphic novels). Both stories are extremely complex narrative constructions and each draws on conceptual domains of the sciences and other disciplines which are assumed by adults to be 'difficult'. Since many adults find these stories baffling, the attractions they clearly hold for young audiences may be a symptom of the different modes of awareness that adults and young people bring to their transactions with texts and the worlds they represent. If we are to engage learners in critical explorations of science, technology and society we need to have some understanding of, and empathy with, their perceptions and values. One of the reasons for so doing is captured in Easy Travel to Other Planets by an architect who becomes a school teacher:

'I like to see what the children are up to. You might say 1 think of them as a kind of early warning system for what's next in the world. Here we are getting older, and there they are getting different.' (Mooney 1982, p. 80)

Most graphic novels reflect clearly their comic book ancestry (even while they are transcending those origins in strikingly original ways), but some authors have made distinctive breaks with this tradition. For example, Big Numbers (Moore & Sienkiewicz 1990), is drawn in a way that recalls the gritty black-and-white images of much post-war European social realist cinema. Unfortunately, while originally planned as a twelve-part series, Big Numbers was abandoned after three issues (appar­ently as a result of artistic differences between its creators). Big Numbers is an incomplete chronicle of the lives of approximately forty main characters in a small English town where a community is being transformed and displaced by the impact of a sprawling new shopping mall. One of the most fascinating qualities of Big

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Exhibit 11: 'Animal Man' These excerpts from chapter 8 (issue 8 of the original monthly comic book series) of Animal Man (Morrison et a1. 1991) illustrate the narrative complexity of the medium. Epilogue II literally arrives 'out of the blue' - it has no immediately apparent connection with what has preceded it - and epilogue III is continuous only with the prologue to this issue (which shows the same computer screen building up to the completion of the Einstein quote). These epilogues are early hints of a convoluted plotline that is not resolved until issue 26. As these epilogues suggest, Animal Man is much more sophisticated than the average superhero comic. Indeed, it embodies concepts drawn from postmodern physics and cosmology which reflect the leading edges of scientific speculations about the nature of 'reality' and human perception.

Aoimal Mao © 1987 DC Comics Ioc. All Rights Reserved.

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Numbers is that it uses fractal mathematics and chaos theory as sources of metaphors which illuminate the social, economic, political, climatic and personal emotional turbulences that accompany this transformation. Big Numbers does not oversim­plify these concepts but, rather, places them in a context which invites explora­tion by learners (see exhibit 12: 'Big Numbers').

Feminist SF While many of the visual arts of SF retain the male-dominated stereotypes that were prevalent in the popular pulp magazine SF of the 1930s and 1940s, there is a strong connection between SF and feminism, which has become increasingly evident in recent years. Sarah Lefanu identifies some of reasons for this connection:

Science fiction seems ... most at ease when it deploys a sceptical rationalism as its sub-text ... feminist ideas are able to flourish within SF [because] feminism is based upon a profound scepticism: of the 'naturalness' of the patriarchal world and the belief in male superiority on which it is founded ...

. . . science fiction is feminism-friendly. With its metaphors of space and time travel, of parallel universes, of contradictions co-existing, of black holes and event horizons, science fiction is ideally placed for interrogative functions. (1988, pp.92, 95)

Reproductive technologies and genetic engineering are important progenitors of SF which performs such 'interrogative functions' for women. These technologies are controversial in SF (see Broege 1988), just as they are in society at large, and most feminist writers treat them with 'profound scepticism'. For example, Angels of Power and Other Reproductive Creations (Hawthorne & Klein 1991) is a col1ec­tion of feminist prose, poetry and plays (much of it Australian) which explores the personal and social consequences of the new reproductive technologies. Angels of Power highlights the sociopolitical dangers inherent in in vitro fertilisation, tech­nologically assisted surrogacy, fertility drugs and 'designer children'. The col1ec­tion raises questions about who real1y benefits from these technologies: the women who are the subjects/objects of the research and technologies or the scientists who compete within a predominantly Eurocentric, white, male scientific establishment for international prizes or funding from transnational pharmaceutical corporations and departments of defence. The inclusion of poetry and plays in the collection makes it especial1y useful as a classroom resource (see exhibit 3). Poetry is a 'compact' resource which does not require extensive duplication and most poems can be read in much shorter times than even the shortest SF stories. Plays can be read aloud or acted out, which many students find preferable to the sometimes solitary and silent act of reading stories.

While reproductive technologies are among the distinctive concerns of feminist SF (see also Lefanu 1988; Le Guin 1989; Webb 1992), feminist SF ranges across al1 of the conventional-and many unconventional-themes of the genre (as is evident in anthologies of women SF authors, e.g. Green & Lefanu 1985; Sargent 1974, 1976, 1978, and single-author collections, e.g. Love 1989). In addition, many works of feminist SF have two qualities which make them particularly suitable

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Exhibit 12: 'Big Numbers' This excerpt from Big Numbers (Moore & Sienkiewicz 1990, pp. 30-1) is preceded by a sequence showing what the boy was doing in school, including part of a teacher-directed study of the community on which the graphic novel is focused. The teacher's final words, as the class is dismissed, are ' ... if we don't pay any attention to the place where we are, well ... then we might as well not be here' (Moore & Sienkiewicz 1990, p. 29). In regard to the sequence shown here, it should be noted that fractal geometry is particularly appropriate for representing the forms, shapes and patterns found in natural environments. Hilbert space is one among several alternatives to Euclidean space.

•

, . ,

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for use in schools: (1) they are humorous and (2) they are explicitly pedagogical in their intent. For example, many works of feminist SF use an approach which Webb (1992, p. 187) calls 'educating the alien'-a mode in which the author 'dis­cusses the human condition as it is revealed through attempts to render humanity explicable to an astonished or appalled alien intelligence'. In so doing, feminist SF texts educate not only the alien but their readers. Furthermore, in the feminist education of aliens, humour is a favourite method of deconstructing patriarchy­including patriarchal sciences and technologies.

Feminist SF is sometimes seen as presenting science and technology in negative terms, but this is not so much because feminist authors are anti-science or Luddites but, rather, because feminism offers a particular kind of critique of science and technology. Thus, introducing her short story, 'A sun in the attic', Mary Gentle writes, 'it isn't technological gadgets, but the scientific perception of the world that worries me' (in Green and Lefanu 1985, p. 111). Feminist SF often seeks out the radical potential of science and technology, envisaging women appropriating and using it as a force for positive change.

Children's SF In a very useful review of SF for Australian children, Ann Grieve (1991, p.5), quoting A. E. Houseman, suggests that many are saying, in effect, that 'I am a stranger and afraid / in a world I never made'. This is not to say that children's SF is gloomy or pessimistic but, rather, that it realistically confronts the alien­ation that many children feel from the world that adults have bequeathed them and rehearses possible responses children may make to its inherent dangers (see exhibit l3: 'Final Exam').

In much children's SF, as exemplified in novels like Gillian Rubinstein's (1986) Space Demons, 'technology is becoming a new archetype for evil' (Grieve 1991, p. 5). However, like much feminist SF, it is not technology per se that is evil but the technological mindset: 'humanity'S answer to anything that is different is to take it apart to see how it works-even knowing that they cannot put it back together' (Grieve 1991, pp. 4-5).

Another parallel between children's and feminist SF is the use of aliens (or people who are in some way different from the norms of modern Western society) to provide a critical perspective. For example, Gillian Rubinstein's (1988) Beyond the Labyrinth focuses on 14-year-old Brenton and his family who are seen, in part, from a point of view provided by Cal, a visiting alien anthropologist. Towards the end of the novel, Brenton sums up the anger and fear that many adolescents feel for 'the world they never made': 'I don't think the world belongs to men any more - not to Western men. They've fucked it all up too much. It's someone else's turn to have a shot at it-women, other races, other cultures' (Rubinstein 1988, p. 142).

Rubinstein is not just putting old words into a young mouth. Similar views are evident in children's SF written by young people. For example, two post-nuclear­holocaust novels, Obernewtyn by Isobelle Carmody (1987) and The Inheritors by Jill Dobson (1988), were written when their respective authors were 16 years old

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Exhibit 13: 'Final Exam' In Thomas Scortia's short story 'Final exam', represented here by a comic version (in Zimmerman, Reit & Brenner 1989, pp. 30-1), Doug and Mary's 'state science fair project'-a laser beam generator­proves to be unexpectedly powerful and destroys a statue outside the laboratory. The explanation seems to lie in a jar of mysterious gas which has been supplied, apparently in error, instead of the gas they required. Doug's response to their science teacher's news demonstrates a common theme in chidren's SF - that young people may be more prepared than adults to consider their moral respon­sibilities in their dealings with technology.

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(Mary Shelley was still a teenager when she wrote Frankenstein). The Inheritors is set in a domed city and details the ideologies, social structures and technologies that protect its inhabitants. Perry Nodelman (1985) has observed that a common pattern in children's SF involves a journey from an enclosed city (and a constricted lifestyle) to a wider and more open world. Such stories can be read, in part, as metaphors for the adolescent's rite of passage from the protected (but sometimes stifling) world of childhood to the relative freedom of adulthood. One of the implicit messages in such stories is that the unspoiled 'natural' world is superior to the technology-dominated city. Nodelman (1985, p. 292) concludes that 'most novels for young readers are fantasies, descriptions of utopian worlds; even those that describe a recognisably realistic world make it safer and more understandable than most of us know the real world to be' (this is a somewhat sweeping generalisation, though it is clearly true of many popular stories for children; see also May 1986). In regard to Nodelman's thesis, Dobson's book is particularly thought provoking because it does not offer escape from the dome as a resolution to the problems of living in a restrictive environment. Rather, it sees survival in terms ofa dynamic balance between personal autonomy and social responsibility. In other words, Dobson appears not to be reproducing the conservative, escapist themes that adults write for children but, as a young author writing for an even younger audience, adopting the 'complex, hesitating orientation toward the future' that Csicsery-Ronay (1991 a, p. 308) sees as characterising postmodern SFs 'mode of awareness about the world'.

Pamela Sargent is another author who does not patronise young readers. Her novels for teenagers, such as the 'Watchstar trilogy' (Watchstar 1980, Eye of the Comet 1984a, Homesmind 1984b), Earthseed (1983) and Alien Child (1988), deal with themes similar to those in her adult SF: cybernetics, biological engineering, transformation of alien worlds, nuclear catastrophe. Sargent is perhaps more trusting of the positive potential of scientific and technological 'progress' than many other feminists. As Morrissey (1989, p. 189) writes of Sargent's work, 'gender equality is not just a matter of political principle ... it is also the almost inevitable result of technological change'. Thus, the young female protagonists of each novel are inquisitive, strong and comfortable with technology of all kinds. Whether they are on space stations, alien worlds or post-cataclysmic Earth, they are strong and effective partly because technology has made physical differences between men and women insignificant and both sexes have more or less equal access to the sources of power in these worlds.

For science educators, the significance of children's SF does not lie in the plausi­bility of the science and technology that may be embodied in any particular story but, rather, in the rehearsal of the choices, actions and decisions that are made possible by scientific and technological achievements. For example, in 'The jumping­off place' a young girl is stricken by a debilitating illness and reflects on the reasons for there being little prospect of a cure:

It was during the Great Changing Time that they'd stopped medical research. Stephanie had seen videos shot during the Time. She remembered a woman

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wearing a stethoscope, looking into the camera and saying, 'Our planet is extremely sick. It has not been well for many years, but now it is close to death. If it is to survive it must have intensive care. The Coalition of Countries, which now includes representatives from every nation, has decided that for the next few decades, perhaps longer, the great minds of the world must work on ways to heal the soil, the air, and the seas. Existing technology can continue to be used if it does not damage the environment, but advances will not be encouraged unless they contribute directly to the rehabilitation of the planet.'

When she'd first seen this video, Stephanie had found it hard to believe that such a thing had needed to be made, that people had to be told that their needs as individuals were not as important as the health of the Earth itself. She thought of a couple who had been shown crying on screen because IVF research had been scrapped and they would never have a baby. That is the height of selfishness, she had thought. The last thing the world needed was another person! Now, lying flat on her back waiting for someone to come and attend to her, Stephanie understood that crying couple a little better. (Pershall 1991, pp.91-2)

This story introduces, in a simple but effective way, the complex debates about priorities in research funding that are an inescapable aspect of science and tech­nology. Such issues should not be seen as 'irrelevant' or 'too complicated' for young learners to deal with. Nor should such stories be seen as relevant only to the peda­gogical domain of English teaching. The assigning of priority to research efforts in and between medical and environmental research (and other disciplines) is a worthy topic for science education and it is stories like 'The jumping-off place' that make the topic accessible to children's understandings and concerns.

Indeed, such topics sometimes find expression in media pitched toward quite young audiences. For example, one of the early episodes of the animated cartoon series 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' (as presented on Australian television during 1991) introduces the inventor Baxter Stockman and his employment by the resident villain of the series, 'the Shredder'. Stockman has invented a mechanical 'mouser' which he hopes will rid the city of its rodent population. He demonstrates it to the proprietor of a pest extermination company whose judgment on the merits and effectiveness of Stockman's invention is: 'What do I think? I'll tell you what I think. In one word: GEDOUTAHERE!! Are you trying to run me outa business?!' The Shredder then appears and offers to manufacture thousands of the 'mousers'. Though suspicious of the Shredder's intentions, Stockman agrees. This incident can readily be interpreted as an allegory for scientists' acquiescence in the appropri­ation of the applications of their research by military-industrial interests.

Conclusion SF embodies what J. G. Ballard (1974, p. 5) calls 'the main "fact" of the 20th century', that is, 'the concept of the unlimited possibility'. This concept has, in part, been nurtured by the breakdown of modern scientific dualisms between human and animal, organism and machine, physical and non-physical, imagination and reality. For example, of the organism-machine boundary Haraway writes:

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Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. (1991, p.152)

Textbook science, and school science in general, has for the most part ignored the consequences of unlimited possibility and insecure borders, whereas SF has responded with powerful myths, metaphors and images: cyborgs, cyberpunks, mutants, time travel, xenogenesis and many others. The 'disturbingly lively' texts of SF stand in sharp contrast to the 'frighteningly inert' science textbooks (and the frightful inertia of school science curricula). For science educators to ignore or belittle SF is like art educators ignoring surrealism- both are vital manifesta­tions of their respective subject's cultural significance. To suggest that SF might revitalise school science is no false hope but, rather, an expression of confidence in the unlimited possibilities of postmodern science, technology and SF.

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Part 3 Sound ideas and (en)light(ening) entertainments

Science and technology are represented in many media that are unlikely to attract the label 'science fiction' or even 'SF'. In this final section I will consider some of the possible connections which can be made between these media and science education. I will begin with some 'sound ideas' about pop music and then consider a miscellany of'(en)light(ening) entertainments' among mainstream popular novels and cinema. I will conclude with a case study of a particular topic, climate change, which is presently addressed in many science education programs and which merits exploration through popular media.

Sound ideas: pop music in science and technology education The acoustic environment of most classrooms is rather boring. Music while you work can be pleasant, especially if it also works for you and your students. Any kind of background music can be an improvement on the ambient noise of some classrooms. This is the function of , Muzak' (sometimes known as 'elevator music'), bland background music which masks irritating intermittent noise - passing traffic, air conditioner hum, conversation buzz. Muzak is not meant to be listened to, but there is a teaching point to be found in its use in science and technology edu­cation: acoustic environments can be manipulated to reduce noise pollution. The effectiveness of Muzak is a good example of the difference between human per­ception and the environmental qualities that can be measured mechanically or elec­tronically (Muzak doesn't 'reduce' noise in ways detectable by scientific instruments, but it may make some noises less noticeable). Muzak is useful when students are working on assignments individually or in small groups and when they are engaged in routine laboratory work.

Background music can also be chosen with a view to its meaning for the learning activities being undertaken. For example, I recall that when I was teaching senior secondary school biology, there were a number of laboratory exercises which required students to work at various stations around the room, spending a set amount of time at each workstation. I recorded a program of songs, each of about 3-4

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minutes duration, using the pauses between songs as a signal to students to change stations. At the time I had an extensive personal collection of recorded folk music and it was easy to compile a program of songs with 'biological' themes - 'The Cuckoo', 'Wild Mountain Thyme', 'Turn, Turn, Turn (to everything there is a season)' and so on. I didn't draw the attention of students to this theme, but part of the way through the program I inserted a bluegrass instrumental, 'Cumberland Mountain Bear Chase'. As it was playing, several students expressed curiosity about its inclusion ('Hey, Mr Gough, all the other songs have been about plants and animals and stuff-what's this one got to do with them?') which suggested that they had made their own connections between the music and their work.

It would be easy to do something similar with contemporary pop songs which either focus on some aspect of science and technology or use metaphors and anal­ogies drawn from these fields. Some recent examples of suggestive titles (with some pertinent lyric excerpts) include:

• Paula Abdul's 'Opposites Attract' (' ... it's a natural fact / We come together 'cause opposites attract')

• John Farnham's 'Chain Reaction' • Prince's 'Something in the Water (does not compute)'

• Sting's 'We Work the Black Seam' (' ... deadly for twelve thousand years is Carbon 14')

• Kate Bush's 'Experiment IV' ('We were working secretly I for the military / Our experiment in sound was nearly ready to begin / We only knew in theory what we were doing ... ')

• Elton John's 'Rocket Man' (' ... and all this science / it don't mean a thing I it's just my job five days a week'; in Kate Bush's recent revival of this song these lines become' ... and all this science I I don't understand I it's just my job five days a week').

If I were making such a tape now, I would also include some older personal favourites like Blondie's 'Atomic', Donald Fagen's 'IGY (International Geophysical Year)', the Divinyls' 'Science Fiction' and The Byrds' 'SD (Fifth Dimension)' (' ... I saw the great blunders my teachers had made I scientific delirium madness').

Pop music can also be used more overtly to set the scene for themes or investi­gations which are to follow. This is already a popular technique with teachers pursuing environmental and health-related themes. Indeed, I've lost count of the times I've heard Midnight Oil's 'Blue Sky Mine' and Joe Jackson's 'Cancer' used in these contexts. However, there are some potential pitfalls for teachers using popular songs in this way. Some teachers seem to forget that what attracted them to a song in the first place was the force and economy with which its 'message' was delivered, yet they still insist on making students state and restate this message in their own words. Any discussion following the playing of popular songs may be superfluous unless it is very largely initiated by students. Rather than trying to wring every drop of meaning and significance out of every word, it may be preferable to let the song speak for itself and to function as a point of departure

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for discussing the issue to which it refers. Teachers should also be sensitive to the possibility that young people may resist having their favourite cultural texts trundled into the classroom for dissection.

Some songs, however, address issues in science and technology which clearly deserve to be examined closely. For example, Sting's (1985), 'Russians' includes the following lines:

How can I save my little boy From Oppenheimer's deadly toy There is no monopoly on common sense On either side of the political fence We share the same biology Regardless of ideology ... What might save us me and you Is that the Russians love their children too.

While the most obvious 'message' in these lines is concerned with fears of nuclear war, my own preference would be to focus any classroom discussion and debate it might stimulate on two other issues. First, the reference to 'Oppenheimer's deadly toy' raises questions about the nature of scientific work, the kinds of people it attracts, and the kinds of people research scientists become through their commitment to that work. In their study of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Charlesworth et al. (1989, p. 128) raise similar issues when they quote a woman scientist who left the institute after working in it for several years because 'you have to choose between being a research scientist and a mature human being'. Another woman scientist at the institute spoke of the predominantly male senior researchers being 'completely myopic', with 'very simple-minded views about larger social and political and philosophical issues', allowing their lives to be 'dominated almost completely by their current scientific concerns'. Yet another of Charlesworth et al.'s interviewees 'paints a rather grim picture of personal impoverishment and immaturity among the Institute scientists as though their scientific careers had inhibited normal personal growth'. Juxtaposing these quotes with Sting's lyrics makes it clear that 'Oppenheimer's deadly toy' is not a cheap shot-a gratuitous slur on a respected research scientist's reputation, who nevertheless displayed an apparent disregard for the mass destruction of human life; when exploring the possibility of radioactive food poisoning he is reported as saying: 'I think we should not attempt a plan unless we can poison food sufficient to kill half a million men' (in Dowling 1986, p. 140). The problem raised by the suggestion that scientists sometimes play with deadly toys is of profound importance for scientists and non­scientists alike. As Marjorie Grene writes:

If the social and political conditions necessary to the existence of science are to be maintained, if scientists are to give their lives to the pursuit of discovery, and if their contemporaries are to support them, both 'morally' and financially, in that pursuit, we need to understand better than we have done the reasons for their devotion and our respect. (1977, p. 166)

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As recent feminist research has demonstrated, a better understanding of scientists' 'devotion' to their various pursuits may lead us to conclude that many of them are not worthy of our respect. In such cases, science educators have no duty to protect or defend them.

The second issue raised by 'Russians' concerns the assertion that 'we share the same biology'. As another way of saying 'we're all human' this statement may seem unremarkable. But at a literal level it is false. We do not 'share the same biology / regardless of ideology', because biology as a form of knowledge is socially con­structed (and thus ideologically constructed). Different cultures and belief systems understand the concept of life, and what it means to be a 'living' thing, in different ways. A glance at the biology texts and references used in various countries (or at different times in the same country) is sufficient to demonstrate that what is valued as 'knowledge of living things' also differs from place to place and from time to time.

Pop musicians have addressed issues of science and technology in a number of ways, mostly with an emphasis on technology and then usually in a science fictional mode. For example, the Alan Parsons Project made several thematic albums in the 1970s on such topics as automation (1 Robot) and satellite communications (Eye in the Sky). David Bowie has drawn heavily on SF in such songs as 'Space Oddity' (and its sequel, 'Ashes to Ashes'), 'Starman' and 'Life on Mars'. The Byrds recorded a number of songs with aerospace and SF themes including '5D' (Fifth Dimension), 'Eight Miles High', 'Mr Spaceman', 'Space Odyssey' (based on Arthur C. Clarke's short story, 'The sentinel' (in Wells 1977), which inspired the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968), 'Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins' and '2-4-2 Foxtrot' (The Lear Jet song) (inspired by the narrative techniques of William Burroughs). Kate Bush has made at least two music videos which might best be described as SF mini-operas: 'Cloudbusting' (a Kafkaesque tale in which the inventor of a rain­making machine falls foul of agents of a police state) and 'Experiment IV' (scien­tists working for the military develop 'a sound that could kill someone at a distance'). J. G. Ballard's Crash (1974), which is among the most celebrated examples of post­modern SF, inspired 'Warm Leatherette', first recorded in the late 1970s by The Normal and rerecorded relatively recently by Grace Jones. Billy Joel's 1991 hit, 'We Didn't Start the Fire', is a potted history of postwar USA in which numerous references to science, scientists and new technology are embedded.

No chemistry teacher should be without a recording of Kate and Anna McGar­rigle's 'NaCl':

Just a little atom of Chlorine valence minus one Swimming through the sea digging the scene just having fun She's not worried about the shape or size Of her outside shell- it's fun to ionize Just a little atom of CI With an unfilled shell

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But somewhere in that sea lurks handsome Sodium With enough electrons in his outside shell plus that extra one 'Somewhere in this deep blue sea There's a negative for my extra energy Yes somewhere in this foam My positive will find a home'

Then unsuspecting Chlorine felt a magnetic pull She looked down and her outside shell was full Sodium cried 'What a gas! Be my bride And I'll change your name from Chlorine to Chloride'

Now the sea evaporates to make the clouds for the rain and snow Leaving her chemical compounds in the absence of H20 But the crystals that wash upon the shore Are happy ones. So if you never thought before Think of the love you eat When you salt your meat

Students could, perhaps, be asked to try to rewrite 'NaCl' so that the chemistry conforms to the textbook version of each ion's subatomic behaviour!

One of the most fascinating and entertaining examples of science, technology and SF in pop music is Transverse City by Warren Zevon (1989), a thematic album inspired by the cyberpunk SF of William Gibson. Gibson's stories, especially his astonishing first novel, Neuromancer (which made a clean sweep of the major SF writers' awards in 1985), are concerned with the lowlife of high technology. His stories evoke a plausible near future world in which the kind of young people we would now call 'streetwise' deal in cybernetics, biotechnology and the global com­munications web. Information is the main industry, the most significant commodity and the strongest currency-it is what people steal and trade, and live and die for. Among the key actors in Gibson's world are the console jockeys, high-speed navigators of cyberspace, an environment created-and entered-at the interface of mind and machine. Zevon is a sardonic and ironic songwriter, and many of the songs on Transverse City are wry interpretations of Gibson's dominant themes, including information technology ('Networking'), space vertigo ('They Moved the Moon'), high-density urban sprawls ('Gridlock'), consumerism ('Down in the Mall'). The title song includes many references to the biotechnologies that are integral to the cyberpunk milieu: 'Here's the test tube mating call, I Here's the latest carbon cycle, ... Here's the well-known double helix, ... Here's the narcoleptic dream' (symbols for organic chemicals also form the background to the lyrics printed on the album's liner).

'Run Straight Down' is one of the more dramatic songs on Transverse City. It begins with the names of the following organic chemicals being chanted by a bass chorus:

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4-Aminobiphenyl, hexachlorobenzene Dimethyl sulfate, chloromethyl methylether 2, 3, 7, 8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin, carbon disulfide

Dibromochloropropane, chlorinated benzenes

2-Nitropropane, pentachlorophenol Benzotrichloride, strontium chromate 1, 2-Dibromo-3-chloropropane

This chant is repeated over and over as an ominous dirge-like backdrop to the main vocal, in which Zevon ruminates on social and environmental entropy:

I went walking in the wasted city Started thinking about entropy Smelled the wind from the ruined river Went home to watch TV ...

Fluorocarbons in the ozone layer First the water and the wildlife go Pretty soon there's not a creature stirring 'Cept the robots at the dynamo

And it's worse when I try to remember When I think about then and now I'd rather see it on the news at eleven Sit back and watch it run straight down

Many of the songs on Transverse City are rich in scientific and technological meanings which students could explore in a variety of ways. For example, it would be interesting to compare the textbook descriptions of the chemicals named in 'Run Straight Down' with the meanings (and contextual clues to their properties) insinuated by the song. It is also interesting to consider the assumptions Zevon seems to have made about the 'scientific literacy' of his intended audience.

I could cite many other examples of pop music embodying science, technology and/or SF but these should be sufficient to indicate the potential richness of the field. Indeed, it is not necessary for teachers to undertake exhaustive searches for more examples-once they have made it clear to learners that pop music is a welcome resource in science classrooms then students will do the searching for themselves.

A miscellany of (en)light(ening) entertainments Science and technology crop up in all kinds of popular entertainments. I have already mentioned mainstream novels such as Janette Turner Hospital's Charades (1988) and William Boyd's Brazzaville Beach (1991), which feature scientists as main characters and, especially in the case of Charades, present some of the problems of scientific knowledge in thought-provoking ways. Another intriguing example is Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins (1990), a novel which has many fantastic

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elements but which resists categorisation in any of the SF subgenres (although the term 'magical realism' has recently been applied to such stories). One of the multiple narrative threads of Robbins's frequently hilarious story is nothing less than an alternative history of Western civilisation, as told by two 'inanimate' objects-Painted Stick and Conch Shell-whose 'consciousness' dates back several thousand years. These objects were once used in temple rituals by priestesses of the goddess Astarte and were subsequently appropriated by the followers of other gods, including Yahweh ijehovah). The reader meets them in a cave in the midwest of the USA, where they befriend some other 'inanimate' objects-Can o' Beans, Spoon and Dirty Sock - to whom they teach the arts of animation and locomo­tion. This is achieved by 'boosting their vibrations' in a 'frequency-raising ritual'. As Robbins (1990, pp.69-70) explains:

The inertia of objects is deceptive. The inanimate world appears static, 'dead', to humans only because of our neuromuscular chauvinism. We are 80 enamored of our own activity range that we blind ourselves to the fact that most of the action in the universe is unfolding outside our range, occurring at speeds so much slower or faster than in our own that it is hidden from us as if by a ... a veil.

We regard the objects that polka-dot our daily lives as if they were rigid, totally predictable solids, frozen inferiorly in time and space. Yet, how can we be so sure that we know what things are doing when we aren't looking at them? When our eyesight is inadequate to truly look at them?

For example, here is a can of Van Camp's pork and beans. Familiar? Take a closer look at the label. Forget the ingredients list (including the sugar and com syrup you may not have guessed this product contains); forget the heating instructions, the declaration of weight (twenty-one ounces or 595 grams, a little heavier than the brain of a horse); forget the modified Old West typeface in which this information is printed, cow-face white and rodeo yellow against a background of bandanna red. Look deeper.

You'll require a magnifying glass, which, incidentally, glass being essentially a liquid, is hardly the passive, inactive object we regard it, either: it just drips and flows at rates we normally fail to register. In any case, the label is paper. When seen close up, it is a rough, tangled bog of wood chips, fragments of hemp, linen fibers, asbestos fibers, wool fibers, and clots of ink, oil, and glue. Each of these substances has its own formal characteristics, and if you look more closely (you must switch to an electronic microscope), if you examine the molecular structure of each, the variety in form-pyramids and rings, spirals and stacks and zigzag chains-is dazzling. And that's the opening act. For the main show, you must look deeper still.

On the atomic and subatomic levels, weird electrical forces are crackling and flaring, and amorphous particles (directly related, remember, to the composition of the bean-can label) are spinning simultaneously forward, backward, sideways, and forever at speeds so uncalculable that expressions such as 'arrival', 'departure', 'duration', and 'have a nice day' become meaningless. It is on those levels that 'magic' occurs.

The magic performed by Conch Shell and Painted Stick consisted of focusing their own force fields to raise ever so slightly the velocity of the others' electron recoil, to widen by a fraction of a degree the scattering angles of their photons. A quantum jump start, if you will. They had always been capable of movement. Now, after hours of energy exchanges, controlled power surges, and meticulous synchronizations, they were able to move at rates detectible to human measure, at rates that allowed them to depart the cave as absolutely, if (from an anthropomorphic perspective) not quite as efficiently, as Boomer Petway and Ellen Cherry Charles [the humans who had left Can 0' Beans, Spoon and Dirty Sock in the cave].

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Robbins is raising issues here that are central to scientists' (or, indeed, anyone's) efforts to understand 'reality'. Our 'neuromuscular chauvinism' shapes our under­standing not only of what we perceive but what we believe is worth perceiving. Just as we are blind to electromagnetic wavelengths that fall outside the ranges of our visual receptors, we are similarly blind to the 'action in the universe' that unfolds outside our activity range. The notion that we cannot be 'sure that we know what things are doing when we aren't looking at them' is, of course, central to the world view provided by quantum mechanics. Ifwe compare Robbins's nar­rative strategy here with that of the conventional science textbook we can see that they have some things in common, insofar as both report some of the propositional knowledge that arises from scientific investigations. But Robbins is doing some­thing more: he is not only retelling what we 'know', he is probing the limits of our knowledge. The conventional textbook tells us about the knowledge in which we are supposed to have confidence, whereas Robbins also adds to our fund of doubt.

Two examples of 'young adult fiction' which are worthy of science educators' attention are Strange Objects by Gary Crew (1991) and The Blue Chameleon by Katherine Scholes (1989). Strange Objects is an epistolary novel, being made up of letters, notes, news items and other documents, many of which are provided by a (female) scientist, 'Dr Hope Michaels, Director, Western Australian Insti­tute of Maritime Archeology'. It is based in part on some of the earliest known historical evidence of the European invasion of Australia, which concerns the sinking of the Dutch vessel Batavia off the Western Australian coast in 1629. In the after­math of this shipwreck, 120 men, women and children were murdered by a small number of their fellow survivors. In Crew's story, some relics of the wreck are found by a teenager, Stephen Messenger, in 1986. Four months later, he disap­pears without a trace. Parts of the novel can be read as Messenger's (and other characters') fantasies. Aboriginal perspectives are also integral to the book's themes and plot. Through the character of Hope Michaels, Strange Objects raises many questions about the nature of evidence and its interpretation. Indeed, as a whole, Strange Objects raises questions about how we come to 'know' anything, especially in the domains of history and science.

The Blue Chameleon is equally complex, although most of the story is told from the point of view of just one character, Beni Ish-Mahel, a teenage survivor of an ancient Saharan desert clan. Beni has little English and works for his uncle in a Melbourne shipyard. When an Egyptian ship arrives, he tries to escape-to return to his homeland to find his lost twin brother, Ziad. But the ship on which he stows away is bound for Antarctica, and Beni becomes involved in another quest with Chris Travers, a non-stereotypical scientist who is trying to unlock the secrets concealed in the diaries (and, eventually, the deserted laboratory) of a French biol­ogist, Roszak, who has died in puzzling circumstances. Ironically, Roszak has des­troyed the object of his own quest, which involves the possible uses of plants which have mutated as a result of the atmospheric conditions created by the ozone hole over the Antarctic. There is a hint of SF in The Blue Chameleon, but this is incidental to the most compelling features of the novel, which include the positioning of modern science and technology in counterpoint to Beni's ancient tribal knowledge.

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For example, Beni uses the symbolism of earth, fire, water and air-the four natural elements of ancient philosophy - to make sense of his surroundings. He looks for old signs in new environments to make sense of them. For example, he takes par­ticular notice of colours, lines and patterns and makes very effective use of a Polaroid camera in his quest (a nice example of technology supplementing human senses by finding messages invisible to human eyes).

The Blue Chameleon raises a number of issues concerning the social responsi­bility of scientists, especially the relationship between an individual's quest for knowledge for its own sake as balanced against potential dangers to humankind. The pressures on research scientists (in this case geneticists)-from governments and industry-and the need to balance ideas of 'progress' with ethical consider­ations are also explored in subtle (but not obscure) ways. The great value of both Strange Objects and The Blue Chameleon for science education is that the scientific issues each raises are not laboured - they arise 'naturally' from the rich, varied and complex lived experiences of their central characters. The issues are given a local context rather than treated as abstractions. In company with some of the distinc­tively science fictional novels for children and young adults (such as Rubinstein's Beyond the Labyrinth, 1988), these novels would make excellent resources for team­teaching efforts in which, say, science, social studies and English teachers col­laborated.

Popular literary and movie genres which border on SF include those that are concerned with natural disasters (for example, movies such as Earthquake 1974, Hurricane 1974, and Meteor 1979) and threats from other species (usually precipi­tated by the unintended effects of human action, such as nuclear tests or chemical sprays). The latter often embody a 'nature bites back' motif and any science fictional element is usually little more than a thin plot device to animate a horror story. Movies of this kind include Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), Empire of the Ants (1977), Squirm (1977) (flesh-eating worms) and Willard (1971) (rampant rats). Among the best known examples of such movies are Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) and Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1977). All of these movies explore, with varying degrees of subtlety, the limits of human 'control' of the natural world. The Birds is perhaps the most challenging of all the 'nature bites (or, in this case, pecks and claws) back' movies because it offers no explanations for the altered bird behaviour and, there­fore, invites speculation and inquiry at a number of levels.

Arachnophobia (1990) is reminiscent of both The Birds and Jaws, though it is much more light-hearted-and more plausible. In particular, it illustrates very clearly the consequences of scientists pursuing their own ideals with scant regard for possible wider effects. An arrogant biologist finds a new species of venomous spider in a sink-hole in the South American jungle and, as a result of his careless quaran­tine procedures, a live specimen is unwittingly transported to a small town in rural California. The spider mates with local variants and produces equally venomous offspring-with mildly horrific (but very entertaining) results. Arachnophobia is a comedy-thriller which can be enjoyed by any age group (I first saw it in the enthusi­astic company of my then eight-year-old daughter and several of her agemates, and even my four-year-old son makes frequent requests for repeat screenings of

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'the spider movie'). Interestingly enough, two aspects of the spiders' behaviour which the screen scientist regards as 'highly unusual' - fertile hybrids and social behaviour-were recently reported by Australian scientists (see exhibit 14: 'Arach­nophobia').

A concluding case study: popular media and climate change The most common approach to education about climate change emphasises learners' acquisition of scientific information about observed trends in the atmospheric com­position of greenhouse gases and the ozone layer, on causal explanations for these trends, and on predictions about their environmental and social effects. This approach is based on the assumption that understanding environmental circum­stances 'objectively' is of great importance in encouraging people to respond appropriately to greenhouse and ozone issues.

But human responses to change usually involve more subtle and subjective cultural influences, including values, interests and language. An educative response to climate change requires us to understand how expected climate change influences the ways in which people think, behave and live their lives. Such an understanding demands that we look beyond scientific interpretations of the greenhouse effect and people's immediate and superficial responses to its expected consequences. We also need to examine the cultural perceptions, meanings and values that constitute people's subjective understandings of climate change and mediate their responses to it. Edu­cation for a critical understanding of climate change must therefore attend to these cultural perceptions, meanings and values.

For example, to understand the personal and cultural dimensions of greenhouse and ozone issues we need to analyse and critically evaluate the language of climate change, especially among young people. Such studies, which can be undertaken by young people themselves, include analyses of the myths, metaphors and analo­gies that pervade the narratives and texts of popular media, curriculum and public information materials, classroom texts and resources, and other cultural forms that engage young people (such as science fiction, children's television programs and so on). Particular attention should be given to evidence of changes in meaning over time and the extent to which transformations of meanings reflect cultural adaptations to climate change. Teachers and learners should reflect critically and self-consciously on the language of climate change and the cultural meanings and values that this language reveals. That is, both teachers and learners need to be constructively critical of their own language usage and to be critical and creative interpreters of popular media and other curriculum materials and cultural resources. Teachers and learners should also undertake their own inquiries into such issues so that they may themselves become active cultural critics rather than passive con­sumers of cultural criticism.

The potential seriousness of the greenhouse effect may be better understood by learners interacting with cultural forms which speak directly to human emotions

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Exhibit 14: 'Arachnophobia' The deadly spiders in Arachnophobia display two unusual behaviours: a South American spider mates with North American variants to produce fertile hybrid offspring and the spiders display social behaviours (and social differen­tiation). As the report by Graeme O'Neill (Age, 10 July 1991, p. 5) suggests, these behaviours are not implausible.

Mating spiders create genetic tension in Canberra By GRAEME O'NEILL, Iclanca and technology reporter

by'the distinctive arrangements of their chromosomes - the

On a trip to Canberra three weeks ago, I opened my car door and waS confronted by a large buntsman spider nestled In the door Jamb. It was' safely dis­lodged to become the latest Vic­torian emigre along the hunts­man spider's own version of the Silk Route between Melbourne and Canberra.

Canberra spiders have nine of '----------------,

Geneticists at the Australian National University suspect the hitch-hlldng huntsmen spiders may have been migrating up the HlIme Highway since Common-. wealth public servants trans­ferred en masse from Melbonrne to Canberra In the mid-1920s.

Dr David Rowell and Mr An­thony Hancock, a PhD student at tbe university's School of Life Scientists, have found that .the riverine woodlands of Canberra are being colonised by apparent bybrlds between a local race of the huntsman spider Delena can­cerides and a close Victorian rel­ative.

Yesterday, they told a meeting of the Australian Genetics Soci­ety at Monash University that the two races can be told apart

their chromosomes arranged in an elaborate dafsy-chaln.

Dr Rowell said tbere are live such races In Australia. occupy­Ing adjacent regions In. an arc from southern Queensland to Western Australia. He believes that in prehistoric times the an­cestor of these races was widely distributed in casuarina and aca­cia woodlands.

When fire-resistant eucalypts came to dominate Australia's woodlands and forests, frequent Intense bushflres may have frag­mented the original Delena range, producing isolated popu­lations tbat, at the time Europe­ans arrived, had gone some way to becoming new species.

Now humans may be bringing them back together. Spiders un­wittingly carried between Mel­bourne and Canberra are mating with the locals, setting np genet­ic tension that Dr Rowell and Mr Hancock believe could hasten the creation of new Delena spe­cies.

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An alternative explanation is that a relict outlier of the Vic· torlan race may have lingered on in the Goodradigbee River Valley, on the other side of the Canberra's Brindabella range, and has been brought over the range by wood collectors.

Delena Is unusual among spi­ders in that It Is a social species. Unsuspecting humans inay en· counter colonies numbering up to 200 spiders beneath the bark of dead acacias and casuarinas, an experience calculated to of· fer an even greater thrill than the discovery of a lone, large huntsman Inside tbe cabin of one's car while travelling at speed along the Hume Highway.

Dr Rowell says that while many hybrid animals are Infer­tile, many of the hybrid spiders are reproducing. The chromo­somal rearrangements that oc­cur when the two races come to­gether may actually create favorable new gene combina­tions that suit the hybrids to new environments.

as well as those which use 'scientific' styles of inscription, narrative and reasoning. Recently, greenhouse-related issues have begun to infuse popular songs, novels, poetry, theatre and other visual and performing arts. One notable example is The Sea and Summer, a novel by the Melbourne-based author George Turner (1987), which won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award (one of Britain's major literary awards in SF) and a Commonwealth literary prize. Turner imagines the rise and eventual collapse of a 'greenhouse culture' in Australia during the twenty-first century. In the following excerpt, Alison Conway, writing in the year 2061, reminisces about growing up in Melbourne during the 1980s:

When I was a little girl going to kindergarten we had the annual glories of the sea and summer. We brats-at that age we are all brats with angel smiles hiding the designs of demons - paddled from the beach at Elwood while the sun showered down bright splinters on the blue-green bay.

Summer! Paradisal time of cold drinks and coloured salads, skimpy frocks and games under the garden hose, days at the seaside with sunburn and jellyfish, sand and seaweed and lush wavelets of cuddling water. Playtime without end!

Yet every year there was an end called winter with lead-heavy clouds and storms on the bay, long woollies and cold mornings, rain on window panes and the fear that summer might not return.

Summer always returned. It was winter that faded imperceptibly from the round of the planet's seasons while magical summer grew humid and threatening and tropically wet. There were mild winters, then warmish winters, then short winters that merged into extended autumns without any real winter at all. Sleet and hail and frost became memories of 'the old days' and their occasional freak appearances disturbed us, menacing the new order of perpetual summer, perpetual holiday.

Lovely changes came to our gardens as plants were tricked by the falsehoods of the weather and some grew to extraordinary sizes. Roses like sunflowers, dandelions half a metre tall, pansies like velvet plates! It's the extra CO2

explained the neighbourhood know alls, it feeds some plants but it kills others. Which others? We saw no others; they had died off and gone away. They explained, too, that the CO2 was a farming disaster, that the wheat belt was shifting south and being crammed against the coast and the old wheat belt was already a dust bowl, forcing whole populations to move and leave ghost towns whispering in an empty countryside.

Didn't they know it would happen? Oh, yes, 'they' knew; back in the 1980s 'they' were warned; but 'they' were busy. 'They' had the nuclear threat and the world population pressure and the world starvation problem and the terrorist outbreaks and the strikes and the corruption in high places shaking hands with crime in low places, and the endless business of simply trying to stay in power-all to be attended to urgently. They weren't attended to; 'they' tried but the troubles were too big, too well entrenched to be amenable to sense or force - and the emerging troubles of the next decade had to be left until there was time, until feasibility studies could be made, the problems seen in proper context, the finance found ...

Suddenly the next decade was here, with urgent new disasters and no sign of containment of the old. It couldn't all be blamed on the CO2 but the saturation level surely helped. Helped us on down to misery and want.

How wonderful it would be now to wake one morning to a near-zero temperature and a wind of winter heralding the old world's return.

Instead we have the sea and summer. The sea is rising over the beaches of the world; the coastal cities face death by drowning. Day by day the water advances up the streets from the shores and rivers; our placid old Yarra was

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long ago forced over its banks by the rising tides. The coast roads have vanished and the lower floors of the tenements are uninhabitable.

The ageing woman has what the child desired - the sea and eternal summer. (1978, pp. 19-20)

This passage elucidates dimensions of the greenhouse effect and its possible con­sequences which tend to be ignored by textbook science. Here we not only find the contemporary conventional wisdom of the effects of rising CO2 concentrations and sea levels, but also some of the social and political effects and, above all, the personal memories and meanings that might be transformed by the greenhouse effect. As this passage builds toward its deeply moving conclusion ('the ageing woman has what the child desired - the sea and eternal summer') it evokes a palpable sense ofloss-'the annual glories of the sea and summer', which Alison Conway might, in her youth, have expected to cherish in later years, have now been soured by global warming. The denial of pleasure in memories of childhood is thus seen to be a much more profound loss than the loss of amenity stressed by textbook accounts of the greenhouse effect and its consequences (for examples of the use of The Sea and Summer in curriculum materials see Greenall Gough & Gough 1989, pp. 17-18).

With few exceptions, popular media in greenhouse education programs are being used only in rather restricted ways. For example, it would not be unusual for a teacher to use, say, a song by Midnight Oil to motivate learning about the green­house effect or to 'reinforce' information about climate change. But it would be a rare science teacher who engaged learners in critical explorations of the song as a cultural text in its own right and who sought to elucidate the significance of the cultural meanings of the greenhouse effect for the production and appreci­ation of the song as a popular media text.

To put this distinction crudely, the more common pedagogical approach to the relationship between the greenhouse effect and a popular text that embodies greenhouse-related meanings is to ask: what can this text help learners to under­stand about the greenhouse effect? Less common, but possibly more rewarding, approaches include asking questions such as the following: How do the cultural meanings of the greenhouse effect inform this text? How does an improved under­standing of the greenhouse effect help us to appreciate the text? What further creative possibilities for the use of greenhouse-related meanings as a cultural resource are suggested by responses to the previous questions? To 'read' the stories of the greenhouse effect in such ways is to engage in the same kind of imaginative project that Donna Haraway exemplifies for primatology (see Reading 3).

Human experiences of climate and weather are socially constructed. The use of common climate-related words, phrases and figures of speech in everyday dis­courses contributes to the construction of persistent cultural myths, such as shared understandings about the meanings of 'bad' weather or a 'fine' day (these expres­sions are more obviously laden with cultural values than are descriptive meteoro­logical terms like 'hot' or 'windy'). One very persistent myth is that changes in climate and weather occur independently of human action-hence the oft-repeated

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jest that 'everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it'. The publicity given to the greenhouse effect and other issues of climate change may be altering the nature and status of this myth.

For example, among the first six episodes of the children's cartoon video series, 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles', two had plots in which the villains deliberately modified climatic conditions (see Beavis & Gough 1991). In one of these stories, a 'weather satellite' produced violent storms (incidentally, this was achieved by setting the satellite's control to 'total chaos', an expression which itself suggests changes in cultural understandings of climate issues, since the concept of chaos has been popularised relatively recently and previously was not used widely in connection with weather). In another episode, energy was drawn from the sun into solar cells so as to induce rapid and severe global cooling. Dialogue in both episodes used variations on the conversational cliche quoted above. For example, after the 'weather satellite' had been destroyed by one of the turtles, another said to him, 'Hey, Leonardo! Everybody else talks about the weather, but you really did something about it!'

Such examples suggest a need for teachers to explore with children the ways in which their readings of popular media relate to their readings of curriculum materials and other information about climate change-to explore ways in which the language of climate change is entering the intertextuallives of learners. That is, how do young people's readings of curricular and media texts dealing with greenhouse-related issues influence their readings of other texts (and vice versa)? Again, the purpose of exploring such issues with children is to draw learners' self­critical attention to intertextual constructions that arise from their interpretations of greenhouse information and popular media.

The myths and meanings that are embedded in everyday language are persis­tent and resistant to change. We need to be able to identify and criticise culturally dysfunctional myths and meanings, such as elements of our language that signify climate and weather as 'acts of god' rather than as social constructions or phenomena susceptible to human agency. If teachers and learners reflect critically on such meanings they may be more disposed to participate constructively in the 'cultural inventions' that may ameliorate their negative effects. We also need to be able to identify language elements in which constructive meanings are immanent. For example, a variety of popular discourses incorporate climate-related metaphors and analogies: administrators speak of 'organisational climate', angry people 'storm' out of rooms and pop songs have titles like 'Raining in My Heart'. The extent to which, say, greenhouse-related meanings are being used metaphorically in popular discourses may be an index of the 'cultural penetration' of greenhouse awareness. Discourse analysis of popular media can be conducted by quite young learners and has the potential to contribute culturally significant data concerning community awareness and understanding of climate change issues.

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Finally ...

A monograph such as this is inevitably selective. I would have liked to be able to explore some other kinds and examples of popular media than those I have referred to here, but we all have to stop somewhere. I could, for example, have examined the exemplifications of science in soap operas, cosmologies in computer games, technologies in toys, chaos in advertising and the politics of dancing. The point is that representations of science and technology are pervasive in print, visual and electronic popular media. As meaningful (that is, meaning full) cultural texts, these media are at least as significant as science textbooks in providing learners with resources for science and technology education-and I trust that I have com­municated my conviction that they can be more significant. Students will make many of the connections between science education and popular media for them­selves, provided that they are given the material and moral support and incen­tives to do so. A critical role for teachers in facilitating these connections is to be exemplary learners: if you are able to demonstrate what you have learned from Paul Simon and Blade Runner, students may be willing to demonstrate what they learn from Michael Jackson and Pump up the Volume. Teachers do not necessarily have to like young people's popular media (any more than children should be forced to like adults' favourites), but they do need to be tolerant, open-minded and respon­sive to the opportunities for significant learning that such media can provide. However, there are treasures and pleasures in popular media which can be enjoyed by children and adults alike-and many of them, especially in the field of SF, can enrich science education. Laboratories in fiction await your learning experiments.

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· .. the last word should be given, not to Andy Warhol exactly, but to 'Andy Warhol' - an android copy of the original (one of many, of course) as presented in a Neil Gaiman script for the comic book Miracleman [the artwork for this comic, by Mark Buckingham, is a sophisticated pastiche of Warhol's serial lithography] ... 'Do you like this existence, Andy?' he is asked:

'Oh, sure. It's wonderful. I like being a machine. 'It's what I always wanted to be. You see, I used to carry a camera with me

wherever I went. 'Now my eyes are cameras, recording all they see. 'I don't need tape recorders any more- I am a tape recorder. 'This is heaven. 'And the comics. That's what I read when I was a child. 'Superman and Popeye and Nancy and Uncle Scrooge. 'And this is a comic book world.'

Scott Bukatman, 'Postcards from the posthuman solar system', 1991, pp.354-5'.

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Annotated bibliography

Bleier, R. (1986), 'Lab coat: Robe of innocence or klansman's sheet?', in T. de Lauretis (ed.), Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

Bleier begins this article by characterising a well-known Nobel Prize winner as 'a man of ebullient stupidity and callousness' (p. 55). She then provides sub­stantial evidence and persuasive argument to demonstrate convincingly that this is a defensible assertion and not a gratuitous insult.

Bleier notes that scientific theories about race and gender are usually put forward 'not by cranks but by recognized and distinguished scientists ... including Nobel Prize winners' (p. 57). She critically analyses recent scientific research on brain asymmetry as a basis for reminding readers of

• the 'implacable misogyny that characterizes science and some ofits most promi­nent spokesmen';

• the 'relative imperviousness of the natural sciences' to feminist, neo-Marxist or other radical criticism; and

• the enormity of the feminist task 'to reconstitute knowledge in the sciences' (p.56).

Bleier's article is a particularly good example of the art of deconstructing the fictions of science as a first step toward reconstructing them in socially just and responsible ways.

Bowers, C. A. & Flinders, D.J. (1990), Responsive Teaching: An Ecological Approach to Classroom Patterns of Language, Culture, and Thought, Teachers College Press, New York.

Bowers and Flinders propose a model of teaching that views the classroom as an ecology of language and cultural patterns. Their 'culturally responsive' approach addresses directly the educational problems and issues raised by changes in social dynamics, the natural sciences and other areas of knowledge and inquiry that characterise the transition from the modern to the postmodern world.

Together with a companion volume by the same authors, Culturally Respon­sive Teaching and Supervision: A Handbook for Staff Development (Teachers

75

College Press, New York, 1991), Responsive Teaching emphasises the import­ance of teachers reflecting critically and creatively on how they present infor­mation and ideas to learners as well as on what they present. Both books offer theoretical justification and constructive practical guidelines for implementing a culturally responsive approach to teaching and learning - an approach which is consistent with many of the criticisms of science education and recommen­dations for its improvement offered in this monograph.

Broderick, D. (1989), Frozen music: Transcoding literature, science and science fiction. PhD thesis, Deakin University, Gee1ong, Vic.

'Frozen music' is an extended essay in the interdisciplinary analysis of relation­ships between late-industrial/post-industrialliterary and scientific theories, with particular reference to their manifestations in science fiction texts.

Broderick is an accomplished Australian SF author and critic who presently reviews popular science books for the Weekend Australian. His doctoral thesis is both entertaining and scholarly, although his (often tongue-in-cheek) delight in resorting to arcane and esoteric sesquipedalian terminology (Le. obscure long words) may irritate some readers. Among other things, Broderick shows how SF, at its best, bridges the gulf between C. P. Snow's 'two cultures' (the humane arts and the sciences) and he elucidates the distinctive narrative strategies used in constructing scientific, literary and SF texts. He is particularly illuminating in dealing with such explicitly post structural SF writers as Samuel Delany.

Charlesworth, M., Farrall, L., Stokes, T. & Turnbull, D. (1989), Life Among the Scientists: An Anthropological Study of an Australian Scientific Community, Oxford University Press, Melbourne.

Life Among the Scientists is an anthropological study of the community of research scientists working at Australia's Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Science. These scientists are shown to comprise a distinctive subculture whose myths and rites of passage are amenable to anthropological and sociological study.

The book clearly demonstrates how scientific research and its methods are shaped by cultural variables, including social, political and economic pressures and constraints, by the institute's milieu, and by the ethos of the international community of medical researchers. The authors concentrate on how scientists actually work in specific situations rather than on what scientists say they do and what historians and philosophers of science theorise about what scientists do. Life Among the Scientists is a significant contribution to the demystification of science which deserves the attention of all science educators, particularly those working in Australia.

Gough, N. (1987), 'Learning with environments: Towards an ecological paradigm for education', in 1. Robottom (ed.), Environmental Education: Practice and Possi­bility, ECT339/439 Environmental Education, Deakin University, Gee1ong, Vic.

Gough, N. (1989), 'From epistemology to ecopolitics: Renewing a paradigm for curriculum', Journal of Curriculum Studies, vol. 21, no. 3, pp.225-41.

These articles contrast the epistemological foundations of education in Western

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industrialised societies with an emerging ecological or ecopolitical worldview. I suggest that a preference for an ecopolitical approach to curriculum work is not so much 'new' as a renewal of scholarly traditions which have their origins in an Aristotelean moral universe and which are currently manifested in deliber­ative curriculum theorising. I argue that these traditions now can, and should, be transcended in the light of recent studies of human perception, post-Newtonian cosmology, contemporary forms of praxis (such as may be found in critical feminist scholarship and some examples of environmental activism) and various forms of practical action in schools and other educational settings. These articles provide a substantial theoretical justification for some of this monograph's central recommendations, especially those concerned with designing curricula which focus on learners developing (in McLuhan's words) 'judgment and discrimi­nation with ordinary social experience'.

Greenall Gough, A. & Gough, N. (1989), The Greenhouse Effect and Built Environ­ment Education, Royal Australian Institute of Architects, Canberra.

This attempt to 'put our money where our mouths are' drew the following appraisal from the compilers of Environmental Education Materials: A Guide for Australian Schools (Curriculum Corporation, Melbourne, 1991, p.24):

A range of classroom strategies for examining the impact that the greenhouse effect is likely to have on the built environment. In each of the dozen teaching activities there is a strong future orientation and a commitment to cooperative approaches to learning. Whilst the activities are not presented as a complete unit of work, the authors have presented teachers with a range of flexible and creative teaching ideas that could be incorporated into existing programs, or serve as the basis of new programs on the greenhouse effect. Each activity includes a piece of stimulus material and a number of ideas for examining the issues raised. This is a comprehensive, flexible and innovative teaching resource that provides a new angle on teaching about the greenhouse effect.

Several of the activities draw explicitly on SF resources, including two which focus on passages from George Turner's novel, The Sea and Summer (see below).

Haraway, D. J. (1989), Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, Routledge, New York.

Haraway, D.]. (1991), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, New York.

In Primate Visions Donna Haraway develops a critical history of 'the primate story' - the scientific understanding of apes, monkeys and humans, together with its multicultural roots and branches, and its myths of origins, family, gender, race and future evolutionary prospects for humans (and those who are 'almost human'). Haraway traces the history of primatology from nineteenth-century taxidermy, through twentieth-century laboratory and field studies, to the specula­tive discourses of SF which intersect with the primate story. She pays particular attention to the work and careers of contemporary women primatologists and to the contested meanings of sex and gender arising from primate studies. The final chapter of Primate Visions, which 'reads primatology as SF and vice versa,

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is a signpost for the sort of imaginative work which should complement all inquiry - and, therefore, learning-in science, and especially in such mythologised sciences as primatology which serve to define and determine conceptions of what it is to be human.

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women collects and revises a number of Haraway's essays written between 1978 and 1989 on the gendered roots of science in Western culture. She analyses stories of the creation of nature, organisms and cyborgs and looks critically at constructions of self in the discourse of immunology. Of special interest in the context of this monograph is 'A cyborg manifesto', in which Haraway describes the relations between organism and machine as a 'border war' and develops a powerful (and appropriately ironic) argument 'for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construc­tion'. Like Pn·mate Visions, 'A cyborg manifesto' is a work of startling originality and adds further weight to the argument mounted here concerning the com­plementarity of 'scientific' scholarship, SF and science education.

Hayles, N. K. (1984), The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strat­egies in the Twentieth Century, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.

Hayles, N. K. (1990), Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.

Hayles, N. K. (ed.) (1991), Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

The Cosmic Web broke new ground in the study of the relations between literary fiction and science. Hayles argued that the paradigm shift in twentieth-century science - away from Newtonian and Cartesian objectivism toward field models­pervaded many aspects of culture, including the writings of such authors as Lawrence, Nabokov and Pynchon. Hayles made extensive connections between scientific theories and literary fictions by analysing the meanings implied (or repressed) in scientific metaphors.

Chaos Bound extends the argument and analysis of The Cosmic Web and posits chaos, or dynamical systems theory, as a new 'cultural dominant' (paradigm) replacing field models. In tracing the chaos paradigm through late twentieth­century culture, Hayles develops a view of postmodernism which has consider­able explanatory power. Her historical accounts of the development of chaos theory are interwoven with clear descriptions and explanations of the relations between contemporary science and literature. Several SF texts are included in the literature Hayles reviews, including works by Stanislaw Lem. Of special significance for science education is Hayles's conceptualisation of a post modern worldview characterised by 'denaturings' of language, context, time and the human-themes which have been explored extensively in SF.

Chaos and Order is an edited collection of thirteen essays by scholars whose interests in science and literature are cognate with Hayles's. They examine how changing ideas of order and disorder enable new interpretations of scientific and literary texts, from Newton's Principia to Ruskin's autobiography, from Victorian serial fiction to Borges's short stories. David Porush's essay is particu-

78

larly illuminating in regard to the epistemological implications of Ilya Prigogine's theories concerning dissipative structures.

Hospital, J. T. (1988), Charades, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld. The concepts of quantum physics are deeply embedded in the narrative struc­ture and language of Hospital's novel, in which 24-year-old Charade embarks on a globe-trotting odyssey in search of her origins. Charade's quest takes her from the rainforests of Queensland to Boston, Toronto, London, Melbourne and back to Brisbane. Along the way she encounters the physicist Koenig at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and it is principally within the stories which Charade and Koenig exchange that the novel's themes and ideas are mediated by metaphors drawn from quantum theory. In the words of one reviewer, 'Charades makes you look at the world around you differently, and that is always exciting, even disturbing'.

Latour, B. (1983), 'Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world', in K. D. Knorr­Cetina & M. Mulkay (ed.), Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science, Sage Publications, New York.

Latour, B. & Woolgar, S. (1979), Laboratory Lzfe: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, Sage, Beverly Hills, Calif.

These justly celebrated sociological studies of scientific activity demonstrate the extent to which scientific practices are shaped by social, political and economic factors. Latour's studies not only demystify science but also demonstrate how scientific activities continue to be such powerful sources of authority in Western industrialised societies. Latour shows that scientific laboratories are sites for the production of meanings which frequently generate socially transformative forces.

Latour shows that laboratories manufacture meanings which function as cultural 'levers' to 'move' society in various ways. Their effectiveness in 'moving' society is less well explained by conventional concepts of political and economic power relationships (such as profit, designated authority, predictable evils or goods) than by the novelty and ambiguity of the cultural meanings they produce and their unpredictable consequences. Latour's studies should thus be of con­siderable interest to science educators because the work that is undertaken in scientific laboratories clearly influences the content and methods of school cur­ricula in ways that go well beyond the content and methods of science subjects.

Love, R. (1989), The Total Devotion Machine and Other Stories, Women's Press, London.

Rosaleen Love's stories are not only entertaining and thought-provoking examples offeminist SF but also embody critical perspectives on science in society. Love teaches and conducts research in the history and philosophy of science at Mel­bourne's Swinburne Institute of Technology and has written articles on popular science for magazines like Australian Society. Like much feminist SF, Love's stories are imbued with a mischievous sense of humor and many should be acces­sible to young readers.

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Mooney, T. (1982), Easy Travel to Other Planets, Jonathan Cape, London. This haunting and lyrical novel perfectly demonstrates what Haraway calls the 'highly permeable' boundaries between SF and mainstream literature that have come to characterise postmodern fiction. Mooney's novel eerily blends infor­mation sickness, affairs with dolphins, an impending war in the Antarctic, the throb of reggae and the lure of computer games. Though not itself a 'cyber­punk' novel, Easy Travel to Other Planets is one of the key works that helped to shape cyberpunk ideologies and aesthetics.

Moore, A., Gibbons, D. & Higgins, J. (1987), Watchmen, DC Comics, New York. As noted in the text of this monograph, Watchmen is to graphic novels what The Name of the Rose is to mainstream literary fiction. Moore draws heavily on superhero and other comic motifs (such as pirate adventures) but utterly transcends them in a gripping political adventure which demonstrates the subtlety and narrative complexity of the graphic novel medium. One of the significant narrative threads of Watchmen is science-fictional and explores a number of social, psychological and political dimensions ofnuc1ear physics (explicitly) and chaos (implicitly).

Morrison, G., Truog, c., Hazlewood, D. & Grummett, T. (1991), Animal Man, DC Comics, New York.

Another superhero revisionist graphic novel which blends the politics of animal liberation, post modern physics and native American spirituality using the graphic and narrative strategies that appear to be instantly accessible to those raised on MTV and computer games. Adults may find it confusing.

Ormiston, G.L. & Sassower, R. (1989), Narrative Experiments: The Discursive Auth­ority of Science and Technology, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Like Hayles and Haraway, Ormiston and Sassower argue that science, tech­nology and the humanities develop in concert with one another and that tra­ditional disciplinary boundaries are problematic and permeable.

Narrative Experiments begins with an etymological study of the origins of our understanding of 'science' and 'technology' and then examines the roles of fiction and other literary modes in constructing these concepts. For example, the texts of Bacon, Galileo, Mary Shelley and Orwell are considered in terms of the hopes and anxieties they evoke concerning science and technology. Other chapters deal with the ambiguous status of science and technology in Enlight­enment texts (e.g. of Hume, Kant and Rousseau) and evaluate various modes of discursive authority in science and technology.

Parrinder, P. (1990), 'Scientists in science fiction: Enlightenment and after', in R. Garnett & R.]. Ellis (eds), Science Fiction Roots and Branches: Contemporary Critical Approaches, Macmillan, London.

In this essay Parrinder surveys the ways in which scientists have been represented in science fiction from the late nineteenth century to the present. He examines various changing ideologies that are attributed to science and scientists in the

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fictions of this period with particular reference to the role of SF as a form of propaganda - both for and against science. Among Parrinder's noteworthy con­clusions is that 'one of the most striking features of the science fiction of the last twenty years is that scientists are far less commonly represented in it than they used to be'.

Robbins, T. (1990), Skinny Legs and All, Bantam Books, New York. As noted in the text of this monograph, Skinny Legs and All is (among many other things) an alternative history of Western civilisation. Rigorous field tests and lexical analyses suggest that, unlike graphic novels, cyberpunk movies and MTV, it is comprehensible to adults.

Science-Fiction Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, 1991. This special issue of Science-Fiction Studies is devoted almost entirely to the theme of SF and postmodernism. In addition to the essays by Bukatman, Csicsery-Ronay and Porush that are cited here, there are many thought-provoking articles which are relevant to the issues raised in this monograph. They include essays by (and about) Jean Baudrillard and Katherine Hayles and discussions of SF film criticism. Csicsery-Ronay's essay on Baudrillard and Haraway is especially illuminating.

Turner, G. (1987), The Sea and Summer, Faber & Faber, London. The Sea and Summer is a compelling novel set in drowning Melbourne during the twenty-first century (the book's US title is The Drowning Towers). It is perhaps the finest novel yet written about the possible social and cultural consequences and correlates of the greenhouse effect. Turner's great strength as a novelist is to not only present believable characters in realistic settings but also to portray the backdrop of future global politics and economics in an equally convincing way.

Zimmerman, H., Reit, S. & Brenner, B. (eds) (1989), The Bank Street Book of Science Fiction, Pocket Books, New York.

An invaluable teaching aid: a dozen 'classic' SF short stories are rendered in comic book form. While none of the visual treatments approaches the sophisti­cation of many recent graphic novels, these stories are enjoyable in themselves and are rendered accessible to younger children by their comic book form. Among the small treasures to be found in this volume is an amusing explanation for William Blake's (1802) lines: 'May God us keep from single vision and Newton's sleep!'

81

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Science Fiction, Pocket Books, New York.

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Reading 1 Science, science fiction, and a radical science education

E. E. Nunan & David Homer

E. E. Nunan & D. Homer, 'Science, science fiction, and a radical science education', Science-Fiction Studies, vol. 8, part 3, 1981, pp.311-30.

We contend that there is a contradiction between the nature of science and the work of the scientist in contemporary society, on the one hand, and what is taught about them in school, on the other. To make this contradiction apparent, we propose to survey current interpretations of the nature of the scientific enterprise and then trace the evolution of science-teaching. Against this background, we will sketch the possible educational role of "New Wave" SF, in which the contradiction is clearly confronted. Our analysis will finally lead to some reflections on the modalities and goals of a radical science education.

First, however, we should say something about our methodological and philosophical assumptions. We intend to focus on the contradiction alluded to above hy viewing scientific knowledge from an anthropological standpoint. We will he following Young's suggestion I of looking at science in the context of the three interrelated elements of social system, socialization, and helief system. When those elements are congruent with the existing framework of power and ideology, they serve to reinforce the status quo. In such terms, scientific knowledge can be regarded as a belief system that presently func­tions to preserve the social order of the system in which that knowledge is produced.

This conceptual framework offers a new perspective on the debate between those who espouse the traditional "internalist" view of science as a totally self-regulated activity and their "externalist" opponents, who empha­size outside forces as determining the rate, direction, and form of knowledge production. That dehate has been something of a standoff between two more or less equally inadequate interpretations. The concepts we are endorsing provide a way out of the cui de sac of the "internalist"/"externalist" dichoto­my. They supply the basis, chiefly, for transcending the internalist view by calling attention to the special and restrictive sub-systems generated to han­dle knowledge and its production, and also to the process of socialization into any such sub-system as a course reserved for the initiate and involving full acceptance of the current belief system of the specialist social group. This drastic redefinition reorients internalist and externalist views alike toward the contextual model of development exemplified in the cultural analyses of Foreman and the sophisticated neo-Marxism of Young in his examination of the historiographic and ideological underpinnings of the 19th-century contro­versy over Man's place in Nature.2

"Contextualism" seems to us the most satisfactory approach for under­standing the relationships among knowledge, knowledge production, and social forces. Drawing upon a variety of "disciplines"-history, anthropology, 311

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psychology, political science, and so forth-the contextualist attempts to locate scientific knowledge with reference to a sociology of knowledge and the scientific enterprise as a whole with reference to the general cultural and social concerns of which it is a manifestation, Only in this way can we begin to get an undistorted picture of science as it is constituted and operates at a given historical moment.

1. Today's science Is characterized by its industrialization. The industrializa­tion of science, as Ravetz points out,' has resulted in a new L'rm of science. Science is now a corporate rather than an individual activity- "organized knowledge" in Sklair's sense of the phrase.' The image of the lone scientist quietly carrying on his research in a university herbarium represents only a small fraction of the reality of modern scientific practice. Science these days is primarily an institutionalized pursuit; and to the extent that it has become an institutionalized part of the social order, it has become socially important.

Sheldon, for one, notes the change in the conduct of science when he remarks, in his introduction to Blissett's Politics in Science, that the

exchange between science and society has created a mutual dependency which is nowhere more strikingly evident than in contemporary America. The survival of 'Big Science.' with its large scale organization, costly installations. big budget. and numerous personnel. depends upon political support. I n turn, American society has looked mainly to science to assure military security and insure uomestic tranquility.'

The institutionalization of science has led to the elite. f/la/wgement of a research system, with the majority of scientists consigned to the role of a srecial type of worker. In the US, for example, "it has been estimated that so'me 200-300 key decision makers- primarily scientists- constitute the inner elite out of a total scientific work forf.:e of some two million."b

As it is socially defined in the West, the scientific enterprise sides with the dominant culture. The values inherent in the structure of that enterprise are consistent with those necessary to the hierarchical division of labor charac­teristic of capitalism. Institutionalized science has made expertise the pre­serve, the privilege, the monopoly of those who are socially selected to hold both knowledge and authority-which, according to Gorz,7 is a requisite for maintaining a hierarchical order in production generally and in society at large. Scientists themselves, whether or not they approve of the industrializa­tion of science, encourage the public's ritual genuflection to science when­ever their positions and privileged status are threatened. Such is the power of scientism that politicians regularly identify science with the liberal tradition and the values of a democratic state, and hence endorse its underlying values. Educators Iikewise subscribe to the mystique of science by assigning it a compulsory place in the curriculum.

2. To understand how science is taught in school and why it is taught the way it is, it is necessary to appreciate the essential features of internalist scholar­ship in the 1950s, from which present-day school·science derives its peculiar interpretation of science. During that decade, historians of science took care to avoid questions of social context, economic motivation, and political priorities as factors helping to shape the natural sciences. As Toulmin says, they drew a sharp line between the contellt of science and its context." The orthodox approach prevalent in the US at the time was based upon three central tenets; 312

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(I) that careful scrutiny and "analysis of the arguments which emerge within the scientific "context of justification" will reveal that, properly conducted, natural science does indeed have a canon, method, or organon; (2) that the central procedures of that method can be captured and expressed in formal algorithms, relating the empirical observations of science to the theoretical propositions in terms of which they are to be explained; and (3) that the "rationality" of the natural sciences lies in conforming to the set of formally valid procedures implicit in the previous tenet.

To he sure, isolated studies did question this orthodoxy: the Soviet historian Hessen argued that the real roots of Newton's Theory of Universal Gravita­tion in the Principia were to he found in the social and economic life of loth-17th-century Europe; Manuel employed psychological analysis to trace Newton's intellectual amhition in part to the effects of infantile desertion:

'and Merton linked capitalism and the Protestant ethic with the rise of science and te~hnology in 17th-century England." In the main, however, the internalist orthodoxy was not seriously challenged.

The political implications of the internalist position did not go unrecog­nized. Polanyi, in his 1962 article on "The Republic of Science," acknow­ledged their connection with the ideology of the "free-market economy." Linking free-market ideology to the ideal conditions for the production of scientific knowledge, he points out "that the community of scientists is organized in a way which resemhles certain features of a body politic and works according to economic principles similar to those by which the pro­duction of economic goods is regulated." He invokes the assumptions of the free market to descrihe both the economic principles and the governance of scientific activity. An invisible hand, "scientific authority," allows for the highest possible co-ordination of individual scientific efforts, just as Adam Smith hypostatized an '"invisihle hand" "to describe the achievement of greatest joint material satisfaction when independent producers and consum­ers are guided hy the prices and goods in a market."'"

Science, in Polanyi's view, is a se1f-co-ordinated system of independent initiatives generating a unique professional social group which supervises a professional code for the production of scientific knowledge. Such a commu­nity of scientists exercises stringent control over:

(I) the selection of papers for puhlication: (21 the conferring of scientific honors and research funds: 01 the publication of textbooks and popularizations of science: (4) the teaching of science at the university and pre-university level; and (5) the protection of the individual scientist in the pursuit of her or his own research."

Such controls were thought to insure the ethical neutrality of science against external interference, which (as in the Lysenko affair) destroys the autonomy of science and the '"quest of truth."

A number of subsequent studies have taken up Polanyi's idea that the community of scientists is a body politic governed hy economic principles similar to those which regulate the production of goods. Many of those studies, however, take issue with Polanyi's political conception of '"economic principles" and with his apparent endorsement of a free-market ideal for science. They have also raised some emharrassing questions ahout the ethical and ideological neutrality of science-a matter to which we shall return presently. Yet science-teaching continues to perpetuate the internalist view in 313

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blissful ignorance of this or any other controversy about the nature of science that has followed in the wake of the Kuhn-Popper debate ll and (perhaps needless to say) without regard for any critical perspective on the socio­economic determinants on the scientific enterprise that Polanyi (perhaps despite himself) has called attention to.

Science-teaching remains the bastion for what might be called the internalist myth of science. Were some extraterrestrial being to survey the practices, texts, manuals, and overall content of school-science, it might conclude that science educators embraced Robert Hooke's injunction to scientists "to improve the knowledge of natural things" but not to meddle with "divinity, metaphysiks. morals, politiks .... or logik."l.l Science educators still imagine a rear-view mirror picture of science, a composite of 19th­century gifted amateurism and 20th-century professionalism. I n contrast to the reality of scientific work as an activity subject to the rules and organizing principles of state or corporate capitalism, school-science offers the fantasy of the independent scientist following his individual whim or interest and free to gather data, theorize about it. and reach objective conclusions.

The values intrinsic to institutionalized science are never considered. On the contrary, for schoolroom consumption science is presented as a value-free activity leading to value-free knowledge and having a life of its own, not to say a unique objectivity. In accordance with traditional internalist assumptions, the scientific enterprise is regarded as being ethically neutral. Napalm. neutron bombs. and similar boons to mankind are explained away so as not to impair that neutrality: how can the weapon be hlamed for the crime?

The privileged irresponsibility thu~ conferred on science and the scien­ti,st is part of the myth of science. The myth. as Charlesworth outlines it. holds that

scientific knowledge is central and paradigmatic. with the \alue of all other forms of knowledge heing judged hy reference to scientific knowledge ~ rational­ity itself ... being defined in terms of science): ... that science ... succeed ell anJ supplanted both religion and philosophy. and that man's salvation depcnll, upon science and that his whole fate is bound up with the progress of science: ... that there is some kind of pre-established harmony hetween the advance of science and human happiness."

Science textbooks implicitly and explicitly foster this myth. When dealing with the technological application of science. they represent science as heing industrially beneficial. without reference to the (military. colonial. and profit-making) purposes of industry or to the nature of the societies which it creates. Science teachers. by their choice of content and methodology. like-wise communicate-oftentimes unwittingly-an ideological position. Adopting internalist presumptions. they treat scientific change as illustrative of this history of ideas about a concept and science itself as representing a concep-tual game in a drama played out by the "great men" in the history of science. Such spectacular intellectual performances. defining the advance of science (and. by implication the furtherance of human well-being), command both awe and admiration. Students are given to understand that science is an elite study and that its purely theoretical concerns have a spin-off effect as tech­nology. which brings improvements in living standards and the like. Scien-tists, it is intimated. should therefore be accorded complete autonomy and financial rewards as an clite group in society. By the way, students come to accept the idea that science education constitutes part of the filtering-out 314

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process by which candidates for the elite are selected.

The myth of science is presently under attack from many directions. Why, then, should school-science be one of the last areas to register change'!

The simplest answer is that many science educators are unaware of the contemporary state of science. Being for the most part unfamiliar with industrialized science, they take their internalist conception of the enterprise from the research practices in a university. It can be argued that their antiquated notions have their uses from the point of view of scientific estab­lishment. After all, the kind of science education they purvey acts to screen prospective candidates for a university education in science (a prerequisite for employment as a scientist). By exerting an influence on high school programs, the university academic insures that this functional relationship continues.

Mere ignorance, however, though it may account for the persistence of the internalist view of the scientific enterprise, does not fully explain why school-science is allowed to go on retailing the myth of science without taking cognizance of its discrepancy with scientific reality. The truth is that science in an industrialized society is a value-charged and ideologically-laden activity. As S. and H. Rose point out, "science done within a particular social order reflects the norms and ideology of that social order."1.1 Science in the West accordingly embodies the norms and ideology generated by the indus­trial base of capitalism. Yet school-science conveys the opposite impression: it portrays science as a neutral study, free of the taint of ideological content. Our point is that any such depiction is itself ideological. By mythicizing the reality, school-science sees to it that science education confirms (or at least does not contradict) the values institutionalized in an industrial, democratic, capitalistic society. Indeed, Tobey suggests that science-and science education - has been promoted to support the socia-political values of West­ern technologized democracies as well as the professional interests of scien­tists as a group.IO The case made in the US, for example, was that democracy is the political version of the scientific method and that, correlatively, an understanding of the scientific method could strengthen democracy (especially in its industrialized and capitalistic form). Science, by this reasoning, became a method in search of content; and as the method (or process) was thought of as neutral, science itself was regarded as neutral. At the same time, science was depicted as a pre-industrialized phenomenon (i.e., as the activity of the individual armed with "scientific method"), and was hence identified with the liberal tradition and free enterprise. Scientific values were thus viewed as heing congruent with the power structure of this form of democracy.

A further clarification of the reciprocity between science education and capitalism in the West can be arrived at by asking why one can speak of a "scientist as a worker" but never "the worker as a scientist." The answer Gorz offers is that

our society denies the label of "science' and of 'scientific' to those skills, crafts and knowledge which are not integrated into the capitalist relations of produc­tion, are of no value and use to capitalism, and therefore are not formally taught within the institutional system of education. Our society ... calls "scientific' only those notions and skills that are transmitted through a formal process of school­ing and carry the sanction of a diploma conferred by an institution. 17

In other words, the system of education so defines scientific knowledge as to preserve the existing social patterns established through capitalism. 315

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As Bowles and Gintis and Green and Sharp have argued,IH post-war educational reform in curriculum, pedagogical methods, and school architec­ture has done little to change the social role of the school. The educational system continues to inculcate values and attitudes conducive to a consumer society with its exploitative social relationships and the class structure conse­quent upon them. School-science plays an important part in that socializing process, on the one hand encouraging illusions of the "free scientist" and the privileged status of scientific work that seem to reconcile the contradiction between free choice and clasS distinctions, and on the other socializing the individual to accept her or his eventual place in the work force. This conditioning process even extends to the language of science textbooks and science-teaching, both of which rely heavily on scientific terminology and ex post facto abstractions which bear no resemblance to language in its collo­quial use and require the student to "know" things he or she has not really learned. The argument whose essential outline we have attempted to sketch, then, amounts to this: that science education in the West takes the form that it has to meet the needs of the social system .. It serves to identify the values of democracy with those of capitalism, and while presenting science as an asocial and apolitical pursuit, it perpetuates the notion of a scientific elite and fosters individualism as opposed to social concern.

The school-science view of science as something unconnected with prevailing socia-economic arrangements is necessary for capitalism in demo­cratic societies. Conversely, to ask that the means of production that science and technology generate be adapted to the social welfare of all rather than (0

exploitative purposes would be subversive of capitalism. By the same token, it is difficult to consider science within a political and social context without undermining its alleged "privileged irresponsibility" and exposing its (mutual) dependence on the status quo. Indeed, any such undertaking almost inevitably raises some embarrassing questions about the values of industrialized capital­ism. For that reason. it should not be surprising that schools promulgate the myth of science as a pre-industrial activity- that is, as if it bore no relation to present socia-economic realities. Yet teachers ought to feel an obligation to face up to the disparity: they ought to make their students aware that the internalist conception of science is not at all congruent with most present-day scientific practice.

3_ SF offers one avenue for approaching the contradiction between the school-science myth and the reality of the scientific enterprise. We will presently suggest some of the ways in which specific "traditional" and "New Wave" SF texts might be employed for that purpose. First, however, we might consider why it is that SF generally lends itself to such uses.

In recent years, SF has moved towards "final emancipation from ... its domination by adolescent technological fetishism." As Parrinder emphasizes," the genre has always involved some degree of imaginative transcendence of the existing social and "natural" order. One of the features of New Wave SF is a consciousness of the effort and struggle necessary for achieving that kind of detachment. It has moved SF towards the "soft" (social) sciences and towards speculative extensions of theory rather than the technological "filling in" of a theory. Even SF not properly belonging to the New Wave has come to focus increasing attention on systems of values derived from the implica­tions of scientific theories. The "parallel" or "alternative" worlds of modern SF, with their self-consistent ground rules, offer themselves as analogues of 316

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the social, political, and psychic processes of the present human situation. The SF text depicts science and society as subject to an evolutionary process; and knowledge about them takes the form of a series of different possibilities for action rather than what the science textbook insinuates: a fixed and immutable "given." Furthermore, many works of SF seriously confront the contemporary state of science and provide a kind of contextual analysis of scientific knowledge and the operations of scientists in respect to the social, economic, and ideological circumstances of that scientific enter­prise. New Wave SF in particular often does more than predict a future or envision another world: at its most significant, it locates science within specific value-systems, demonstrates the limitations of both, and examines alternatives.

SF of this sort has a special educational relevance. It can be used as a means for bridging the gap between real science and school-science. It can serve to call attention to the value-emphases inherent in different types of science and for placing science in a socio-cultural context. So employed, the SF text can lead to an awareness of the assumptions hidden in school-science.

For such purposes, the SF text must be looked upon as a fiction generated by extrapolating from scientific theory. The "textbook science" behind that extrapolation is sometimes considerable (as in Hoyle's The Black Cloud), and other times almost nugatory (as in Le Guin's The Dispossessedl. But in either case, the extrapolation must be the central concern for determining what the fiction has to tell us about the larger factors affecting scientific theory and the paradigms they exemplify.

This does not mean that any and all literary considerations are to be left out of account. On the contrary, we would propose that the first thing to be looked at is the matter of human motives in the fiction in relation to the plot and its outcome, the point of view of the narrator (if applicable I and of the author, the author's social context, and so on. These findings, however, should be integral to an analysis of the interconnections among the actors in the fiction and of their perception of their relationship to science; and that analysis, in turn, should contribute to an understanding of the relevance of the science to the fiction and hence to theoretical science at large.

We do not mean to suggest that teachers should concentrate only on the "textbook science" contained in the SF extrapolation. To do so would amount to little more than presenting the school-science orthodoxy in a slightly unorthodox way. Instead, we are advocating "social analysis" of SF. The objective of the analysis is to reveal what a given SF text has to say about how science affects individuals as social beings and about how scien­tific knowledge results from human interactions in special social settings.

To illustrate what we have in mind, we have chosen five examples, appropriate for various age groups and levels of intellectual maturity: Lem's The lnvincible and So laris , Fisk's Trillions, The Black Cloud, and The Dispossessed.

4.1 The In.·;ncible (1967) is about an inter-stellar cruiser which lands on the desert-planet Regis III to investigate a loss of contact with an earlier expedi­tion to the planet by the Condor. They find its crew dead and the ship in a state of total disarray. The Commander of the lm·incible. Horparch, and his lieutenant. Rohan. face the problem of resolving the various explanations for the disaster put forward by the scientific experts aboard the cruiser.

The notion of inorganic evolution represents the scientific extrapola-tion of The lnvincible; the essential assumptions concerning organic evolu- 317

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tion are exposed through this extrapolation. The relationships between the "building blocks" of matter and the concept of evolution provides a central scientific focus for the work.

With organic evolution. change is dependent upon chance mutations of the genetic unit (a single gene or functioning unit of more than one gene) which affects an organism's survival value in a particular natural environ­ment. Lem turns this form of evolution about and proposes inorganic evolu­tion with building blocks of a much freer kind (unrestricted by the organic Watson-Crick "zipper" effect) occurring in a non-natural environment.

Thus the scientific understanding of The ill vincible involves a familiar­ity with orthodox explanations of organic evolution: and for the science student the work sharpens the concepts "evolutionary unit"' and "natural environment." This understanding is furthered by consideration of the inter­nal consistency of the new science provided by the extrapolation. The relax­ation of the assumption concerning "natural environment"· results in a superi­ority of a "lower" evolutionary form.

As the crew of the illl'illcible proceed with their investigations. they are attacked by black clouds which consist of millions of tiny individual metallic flakes (each one on its own harmless). These clouds destroy the intelligent functioning of both humans and their robots. It is finally concluded that the clouds are the end result of millions of years of inorganic evolution which began with a robot technology introduced to the planet by an unknown civilization.

Horparch is confronted with an evolutionary product which follows "the first principle of a homeostat. to outlast. to sun:ive under changing conditions however difficult and hostile those conditions might be" ~ 6: 10 II. 2"

Faced with this dilemma various solutions are mooted. one of which is the tblal annihilation of the clouds. for it is pointed out that (hey might leave the planet to become a threat to interstellar travel. Ultimately. two fa<:tors dominate Horparch's behavior. both involving a need for certainty. First. does the behavior of the clouds represent a collective intelligence. or merely a collective instinct'! His persuasion that the latter is the <:ase governs his finul decisions about what he must do before he leaves.

Away from the ship five men have been lost. and although it is hardly possible they can be alive. Horparch must be certain. The other crew mem­bers would otherwise be in doubt. He knows that unless the men who undertake such journeys are absolutely sure that a ship will never anandon them on an alien planet. "spaceflight would not be possible" (10: 1541. This unwritten morality. closely akin to the loyalty of patriotism. is. like the contemplated action based on the hypothesis about inorganic evolution. a means of mystifiying the process of colonizing space.

Finally Rohan is morally blackmailed into a search for the lost men. He has already entertained serious doubts about the actions of Horparch. the other scientists. and man's very motive for the exploration and colonization of space. He worries. in particular. about the use of technology in "destruc­tion at all costs" to make the universe "safe" (see ':1:145-47). His vision is of an active. evolving Universe. in which evolution is an essentially neutral process. a view which has much in common with that of the liberal conservationist. What Rohan fails to see. however. is that as the expenditure of capital anu technology is necessary for space exploration. exploitation is "inevitable"; for Man assigns value to the "neutral" universe according to how his activities are hindered or facilitated. The universe is no more value-free than Afri<:a was to the l':lth-century explorer or the Atlantic to Columbus. 318

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In the end, Rohan returns to the Inl'incih/e with the knowledge that the men are dead, and with his vision further confirmed. Against this, however, we can see that the cruiser can now leave with Horparch's "unwritten code" satisfied, through Rohan's action. In terms of the overall end of the exploita­tion of space, the expedition is a success. Horparch has the information he came for, and has lost a small amount of face, some men, and a quantity of replaceable hardware. The expedition, in terms of the overall scheme, is a Sllccess; Horparch as an individual is not to blame: indeed, blame doesn't enter at all.

The special circumstances examined in The Invincible can be used for considering "normal' evolution of homogeneous organisms that inhabit the same planet. Science in the fiction emerges as a tool of colonialism, in whose service scientists are exploitable and expendable. Curiously enough, even sllch a radical extrapolation as represented hy the theory of inorganic evolu­tion neither changes the thrust of space exploration nor challenges the overall pattern of scientists' activity. They are portrayed as a tough-minded, competitive group who see their role, under Horparch, as the production of solutions. using standard procedures, whatever the circumstances.

4.2 Soluri.f (1961) is a novel largely about the kind of scientific culture and related ideology which man creates. It is set on a station suspended above the rlanet Solaris, the surface of which is an "ocean" consisting of a colloidal suhstance capahle of assuming various semi-permanent shapes. some of which, "mimoids." are more or less copies of ohjects common on Earth or on the scientific space station. The planet has so long neen the subject of study by scientists that a whole branch of science. Solaristics, has developed. Much of the novel concerns the history of Solaristics and its major figures, controversies, and theories. The actual nature of the planet is a matter of debate, and the manned station is the main source of empirical data for Solaristic studies.

The scientific extrapolation central to So/uris is based on the notion of coding. The Visitors (referred to as "Phi" creatures or "polytheres"J are projections materializing from the brains of the occupants of the space station. The origin of the materializations lies in the most durahle imprints of memory, those which are especially well-defined, but of which no single imprint can he completely isolated. Any attempt to understand the motiva­tion of the occurrences is hlocked hy the anthropomorphism of the "owners." In Freudian terms, the Ocean has made concrete the forces of the id; and the "hlocking'"' is analogous to the postulated Freudian mechanisms which oper­ate he tween the id and the ego.

I nformation-processing theory asserts that the brain has an infinite capacity for storing events and thought: however, because of our limited retrieval capabilities, we are ahle to tap only minute amounts of raw or cross-fertilized "information." Theories ahout the physiology of memory are still in their infancy. Lem bases the extrapolation in Solaris around the RNA-protein model. This model considers that "memory" can be accounted for hy the fact that specific molecules may store information. Evidence for this theory is that there is an abundance of RNA in hrain cells, and one variant of the RNA-protein model associates specific experiences with quali· tative changes in RNA molecules.

Just as we are ahle to "read" genetic information through analysis of DNA structures located on chromosomes, the Ocean has been able to tap the psychic processes through "reading" the physio-chemical processes which alter the structures of cerebrosides. Ultimately. our physiological explanation 319

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of learning and memory will probably involve some combination of neurons. glia. RNA. and proteins by which coded information is stored and retrieveu. The Ocean is able to interpret such stored traces and materializes the "psychic tumours" of each of the scientists on the station.

Solan's demonstrates two limitations of the scientific culture. its anth· ropocentricism and institutionalization. Both are shown to result in a crippling mysticism. On arrival Kelvin remembers "that thrill of wonder which had so often gripped me. and which I had felt as a schoolboy on learning of the existence of Solaris for the first time" (2:25).21 The novel traces his descent into a mysticism of despair. which parallels the disintegration of his confi· dence in "orthodox" scientific explanation. His problem is compounded by the futile relationship he develops with the "reincarnated" Rheya. in which his emotion overrides his scientific "rationality" and thus demonstrates the latter's flimsiness. It is only her voluntary "suicide" which frees him again to consider the problem of Solaris.

As he reads into the history of Solaristics. Kelvin becomes increasingly convinced of the limitations of institutionalized science to explain phenomena. Lem's choice of Kelvin as narrator allows the reader an acute sense of this bitter disillusionment. Science emerges as ultimately self-defeating: as a field once vital with originality and adventurous theorizing degenerates to mere data-gathering. new theories are produced only by those branded as cranks hy the scientific establishment. In Kuhnian terms. Solaristics requires a new paradigm: and ironically it is Gibarian. the most cautious but optimistic proponent of contact with the Ocean. who had come closest to providing it.

But if Kelvin can see all this for himself. it is Snow who has to point out to him its cause- the compelling geocentricism of science. As he says. "We don't want to conquer the cosmos. we simply want to extend the boundaries o!r Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos" (6:72). It is Snow. too. who points out that these limitations render Solaristics unequal to the task it has set itself. and who rejects equally the mystic and deistic alternatives which Kelvin wants to substitute for his scientific training. Finally. when the others decide to leave the station. Kelvin elects to stay. "in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past"-the miracles of contact with the Ocean and the "return" of Rheya-while knowing that one must "be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time. and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going" (14:204).

Solaris demonstrates the limitations of science as both a methodology and a faith and suggests the origin of these limitations. It is. in a sense. a despairing novel, for it posits inadequate alternatives. It shows scientists faced with phenomena which stretch their knowledge to its limits-and neyond, It depicts Solaristics as an elaborate attempt to construct a reality (or realities) which. however. cannot account for their human experience. The book might also afford the opportunity to examine the distinction between established and "illegitimate" science (or occultism; Lord Kelvin. after all. was an early proponent of experiments in ESP). Kelvin's tragedy, ultimately. is not his loss of faith in his scientific training. but his inability to see in himself a solution to the problem of Solaris. He has too long relied on terrestrial. societal props.

4.3 Trillions (1971), according to its blurb, is SF "for readers of ten and over." Set in a US town, its main characters are a highly inventive boy, Scott. and a retired astronaut known as Icarus. "Trillions" begin to arrive on Earth 320

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quite suddenly one day. Somewhat like the metallic particles in The Invinci­hie. they are tiny indestructable crystalline objects, resembling multifaceted gems. Their shape enables them to mesh together, and they soon prove themselves capable of building huge but apparently meaningless structures. Scott compares their mass-instinct with that of bees and the collective con­sciousness of the hive.

What makes Trillions appear sinister is that they build imitatively. though there is no evidence that they intend harm. All over the world they are perceived as a threat by the political-military authorities. In America. General Hartman is in command of their destruction; and it is not long hefore he begins to contemplate the use of nuclear weapons against their structures.

Since Trillions is written for young readers, it is not surprising to find a greater emphasis upon descriptive and observational aspects of text-book science. However, it is an extrapolation loosely based around the notion of ecological balance which forms the essential conceptual science of the work. Trillions are ecological organizations which can work to establish conditions for ecological balance by providing "themselves as the punching bag for all our fighting instincts" (p. 95).22 Mankind, by contrast, makes the achievement or that balance throughout the planet an impossibility. National aggressiveness works against the degree of cooperation which would be necessary to serve the cause of ecological stability. Once the sublimated forms of aggressive hehavior are directed towards Trillions, however, the possibility of the human species' unified action emerges.

By representing the Trillions as ecological org~nizations, the fiction introduces the background "text-book" science. It establishes a working vocabulary of discriminations (e.g., forming vs. mimicking vs. imitating, ecologically purposeful behavior vs. instinctual reactionary intelligence, indi­vidual vs. social intelligence) which are pinned to observations drawn from the natural history of such animals as bees, parrots, dead-head moths, chame­leons, fishes. and insects. The novel deals with scientific discovery in both its creative and its puzzle-solving phases. Like the celebrated case of Friedrich August von Kekule. Scott arrives at his fundamental insight in the mind's "twilight period" when "the screen of his brain" is active and awaiting the familiar falling-asleep processes of the brain to take over. Just as Kekule's dream of snakes, in which one "had seized hold of its own tail and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes," resulted in providing the clue to the cyclic structure of the benzene molecule,"lJ Scott's "meaningless" rhymes prompt the "eureka" response.

From his discovery that Trillions are responsive to musical pitch, Scott extends control over the "learning process," first by stimulus-response condi­tioning and later by "aiming his mind" until Trillions could "hear" his mind as well as they could hear the note of the xylophone (p. 53). Scott gradually ascertains their ecological concern by teaching them how to communicate with him, first by taking advantage of their ability to imitate shapes and having them form letters of the alphabet, and eventually by a kind of telepathy. Their home planet, he learns, has been destroyed; but they can save the Earth from nuclear ecological disaster if mankind will hate them, for this will unite nations in the face of a common threat.

In time that is what happens. The nations of the world, under the command of General Hartman, launch a concerted nuclear assault on the Trillions, but the result is holocaust and not the destruction of the Trillions. The General, whose whole strategy has been couched in politico-military 321

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terminology, amplified and slanted by the media, now finds his words turned against him. Set on a course, he cannot deviate; and following the failure of his first plan, he prepares to implement one even more terrifying. The novel sets out to show the limitations of a united global effort which is based solely on the monomaniac application of military-scientific knowledge. Scott, who has acquired considerable powers of telepathic communication with the Trillions, now uses them against Hartman, but finally has to send them away for the safety of the world.

In that we are in the end returned to the status quo, the book is pessimistic. However, in its course it also raises a number of interesting issues, particularly as it opposes Scott, a child, working outside the structure of the scientific establishment and successfully influencing events, with the ineffectiveness of the highly sophisticated scientific worker, Icarus. Icarus stands as an example of obsolescence as well as disillusionment; his usefulness to science and the military ceases just as he is realizing his futility. Though ideologically muddled, the book does demonstrate the ineffectiveness of liberal conservationism in the face of corporate capitalism and its scientific· technological resources.

While it is clear that pre-adolescent readers will not feel the full socio­political impact of the work, Trillions nevertheless provides an interesting and effective introduction to the notion of ecological balance. It also introduces basic questions about the nature of language and communication and, like So laris , about psychic phenomena. Most importantly, though, ecological sci· ence is placed in its political perspective as an example of scientific knowl· edge which is pushed aside because its application on a national or global scale is inimical to the interests of capital, which is represented in Trillions in fits military aspect.

4.4 Wben Fred Hoyle says in tbe Preface to The Black Cloud that "there is very little here that could not conceivably happen," he is referring not only to the text-book science of the fiction, but also to the social milieu with which it deals. Set only a little in the future (1965-75; the book was published in 1957) it "establishes" its authenticity mainly through narrational techniques, pretending to be an account found, years after the events portrayed, in the private papers of one of the protagonists. The world in which Hoyle's charac­ters move is a faithful copy of one familiar to him: the English socio-political Establishment-the Ox bridge circle of eminent scientists-and the reciprocally dependent and exploitative relationship which exists between the "two cul­tures." The science, too, is "realistic," representing the contemporary state of accepted paradigm knowledge in cosmology and computer science. Socially and scientifically it is the world of c.P. Snow's "Strangers and Brothers" novels.

The main object of The Black Cloud is to explore the notion of social responsibility in science and government. It chief character, Kingsley, is an eccentric and brilliant astrophysicist, a Cambridge Professor who is regarded by the political establishment, which funds his work, as something of a renegade. Kingsley has no patience with politicians, and entertains the elitist notion that world peace and mankind's safety rest with the international "brotherhood" of science. His colleagues are largely men - Americans, Russians, Australians, Swedes-who share his interests (physics and music).

The first part of The Black Cloud deals with the discovery of the Clouu and of its implications. On the one hand, the focus here is on the scientific theorizing about the nature and speed of approach to the Solar System of this 322

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vast cloud of gas; and on the other, attention is given to the political maneuvering which goes on as the world governments prepare to face the consequences of the Cloud's arrival.

Hoyle's central scientific extrapolation concerns the physical and "psy­chological" nature of the Black Cloud. In the Preface, he refers to the Cloud as a "black hole in the sky," and thus invokes what in 1957 (if not still) would have been regarded as the speculative theory of "black holes." (The "text­hook"' science of "black holes" has since been developed by Penrose's 119651 significant paper on Gravitational. Collapse and Space-Time Singularities.2~) Secondly, Hoyle builds into the properties of "black holes" the notion that the Cloud represents a source of intelligence. Since the transmissions them­selves cannot be primary causes of ionic fluctuations at the periphery of the Cloud (the energy to produce such ionization is insufficient), the Cloud itself must be a source of power, capable of reacting (and communicating). The next extrapolation is thus concerned with what differentiates the animate from the inanimate. This distinction forms a major topic in lower secondary science and is typically handled by the application of a classification scheme applied in an algorithmic fashion. Hoyle's book might therefore generate discussion ahout the assumptions implicit in such a scheme.

The text-book science which permeates The Black Cloud is more ohvious than it is in our other examples of SF. Hoyle is so punctilious about having his science accurate that he even provides footnotes which give approximate calculations in regard to· specific prohlems. The predictions (hypotheses) offered as the Cloud approaches range in concern from atmo­spheric heating and cooling and biological properties of plants and animals to Newton's laws of celestial mechanics. .

The Cloud arrives in the Solar System and stays there, blocking the Sun's light. While the Earth undergoes massive ecological disasters caused hy drastic cyclic weather changes, the scientists snug at Nortonstowe continue wit h their experiments and listen to Beethoven. Yet the Cloud has its psycho-political impact. First the scientists become more and more self­responsible, to the alarm of the politicians. Secondly, they gain power because they have the only radio equipment in the world capable of universal recep­tion and transmission. Finally, they determine the nature of the Black Cloud as an immensely ancient entity that constitutes a vast intelligence. Their equipment and knowledge enable them to establish contact with it, and a two-way transfer of information begins. They ask it a numher of questions ahout the origins of the universe and the nature of God. These prompt it to reveal that it is leaving precisely because it has "heard" of an event occurring relatively nearhy which will throw light on such problems. It is going to investigate, hut before it goes equipment is set up to allow it to transmit some of its fundamental knowledge to individuals in its own language.

Kingsley, in proposing his animate explanation of the Cloud, imagines himself to be free of the psychological block of "earth centered ness:' How­ever, it is patently obvious that this "earth centeredness" still inhibits his thinking inasmuch as his scientific explanations are still steeped in the laws applicahle to Earth. (Kingsley readily assumes that such scientific laws apply to the universe at large.) Thus we find explanations of the genesis, evolution, internal functioning and neurological control of the Cloud in terms of parallel functions of earlh~1' "beasts." Biological evolution is seen as taking place within the Cloud; and its genesis is perceived in terms of propitious circum­stances (suggestive of explanations of the origins of Earth's biological materi-all. its internal ordering in terms of magnetism, and its neurological control in 323

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terms of our laws of electromagnetic transmission. Ultimately, it is this "earth-centeredness" that destroys Kingsley. The

radical nature of the knowledge transmitted to him causes a drastic reorgani­zation of his brain's neurological patterning and thereby causes his death. With Kingsley a dead scapegoat and the Cloud gone, life in all respects returns to normal. Neither politicians nor scientists emerge with much credit. but Hoyle's notion of the scientist as heroic victim remains. This obscures from view the fact that his scientist-saviors demonstrably fail largely because they choose to operate outside either a national or global society to which they are responsible. Politically naIve in all senses of the word. they have regressed into a kind of liberal anarchism, a privileged political position suited to the frontiers of Establishment Science but of little use to social betterment. Whatever they have achieved, it is not an independence of action; they remain ··workers." useful and powerful only as long as particular circumstances last.

As the most orthodox work of SF discussed here. The Black Cloud at first seems of most use educationally in terms of the text-book science it contains. This is clearly set out in footnotes, diagrams. and detailed conversa­tions containing scientific reasoning. These are the means Hoyle employs to create an impression of authenticity. Yet, while the novel contains material on physics. biology. mathematics and so on, its value to radical-science leaching lies more in its serving to reveal the limits of existing paradigms and the limited effectiveness of scientists' actions.

However. there remains a problem here. Solaris. too. faces these issues more or less as a matter of intent. Kelvin. and Sno~ as well. preselll Solaristics-that is. are aware of it-as theory and methodology to he questioned in the light of the events of the novel which their science cannot eXplain. At least they realize the need for new. "unorthodox'" solutions. Hoyle's scientists do not. Some of them. like Marlowe, may have qualms about some of their actions. but none of them questions his own scientific intuition-which is not to say that they do not want to learn from the Cloud. Our final impression is that what the narrator. Dr McNiel. says of his genera· tion also has aptness for the book as a whole: it is "uncertain. not quite knowing where it I is I going" (p. 249).

4.5 If So/aris investigates the culture of science and the role of individual scientists in it. The Dispossessed (1974) sets out to examine the role of the major scientist within society. By alternating perspectives from Urras to Anarres. Le Guin is able to compare the scientist's role in two different social systems. Her account of the inventiveness of the Annaresti in eking out an existence on their world. through the application of technology in a socialist economy, puts ecology and biology-as well as geography-in a new perspec· tive.

Hundreds of years before The Dispossessed opens. Anarres was settled by a dissident anarchist group from Urras. who were led by Odo. the creator of their fundamental ideology and writer of the works according to whose principles the new society was (and is) arranged. Annares was sealed off from Urras by "The Terms of the Closure of the Settlement of Anarres" which allowed only radio contact and trade. but no migration. Both societies know of the existence of other worlds beyond their solar system. Hainish and Terran. which have established embassies on Urras. Again. both societies are aware of the states of Hainish and Terran knowledge, particularly in physics.

The novel traces the career of the brilliant Anarresti physicist Shevek. 324

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who hecomes the first person from his world to be I\'!rmitted to visit Urras. From youth, his inventiveness and humanity have led him to both brilliant achievement and periods of (voluntary) exile, for despite the principles set out hy ado, Anarres is a political world, and political considerations operate within its scientific community as they do in society at large. Shevek has suffered plagiarism and lack of acceptance on the one hand, and political denigration on the other, since ideologically he holds firmly to Odonic principles, which he sees as being eroded. Le Guin has surprising skill in creating "other worlds" with totally consistent social, physical, and semantic systems. Here she shows one which is accepted by the average member of society as generally happy and self-regulating, but which is yet open to manipulation and political intrigue.

Shevek's journey to Urras is not popular, but he sees it as essential to "shake up things, to stir up, to break some habits, to make people ask questions. To behave like anarchists!" (13:317).26 But as well as this socio­political role, his journey has a scientific aim. He wants a change of scene and colleagues so that he can go ahead with his physics. In particular, he seeks a milieu in which his work is recognized-and Urrasti society has awarded his achievement its highest accolades. The novel's scientific extrapo­lation in describing this work is of fundamental importance.

The extrapolation in The Dispossessed centers around relativistic field theory (and implies, by the way, that present orthodox or "text-book" physics has become a backwater). Shevek is working on a special branch of temporal physics which is directed towards a general field theory of time. To him a true chronosophy must provide a field theory in which the relationships between the linear and circular aspects or processes of time can be under­stood. He explains the relationship between the linear (sequential) and circu­lar (simultaneistl ideas by a "foolish little picture": "you are throwing a rock at a tree, and if you are a Simultanist the rock has already hit the tree, and if you are a Sequentist it never can" (7:190).

Shevek has been given a book translated from Terran containing the results of a symposium on the theories of Relativity, the physics of which seems outdated and cumbersome. Yet he found the work of Ainsetain (Einstein), the originator of the theory, strangely stimulating. He experienced a sympathy with Ainsetain's quest for a unifying field theory, for after all, it was also his aim.

Ainsetain had explained the force of gravity as a function of the geometry of space-time and had then sought to extend the synthesis to include electromagnetic forces; but he had not succeeded. His quest was not furthered by quantum scientists, as indeterminacy (which old Ainsetain had refused to accept) led them into a different form of physics. Yet Ainsetain's original intuition had been sound-indeed, Cetian physics equipped with theories of infinite velocity and complex cause had generated a unified field theory.

Le Guin, through Shevek, provides an accurate description of relativistic concepts.

For Ainsetain, too, had been after a unifying field theory. Having explained the force of gravity as a function of the geometry of space-time, he sought to extend the synthesis to include electromagnetic forces. He had not succeeded. Even during his lifetime, and for many decades after his death, the physicists of his own world had turned away from his effort and its failure, pursuing the magnifi­cent incoherences of quantum theory with its high technological yields. (9:232)

Just as Einstein noted that "after long probing I believe that I have now found 325

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the most natural form for this generalization I unified theory I. but I have not yet been able to find out whether this generalized law can stand up against the facts of experience,"27 so Shevek seizes upon the notion that a General Temporal Theory does not rest upon the unprovability of the hypothesis of a real co-existence of simultaneity and sequency. He is convinced that scien­tific theories are different from mathematical systems, which may be internally consistent and yet not represent or correspond to any form of reality. The book thus provides brilliant insights in the area of relativity theory.

The Urrasti, of course, are interested in Shevek's work for other than theoretical reasons. It will, after all, become the basis for a technology making possible instantaneous communication over interstellar distances. That is. it has use in the commercial, military, and political sense. Shevek finds that Urrasti academic life is intensely political and competitive. and is initially puzzled by the beauty and elegance of his surroundings. Gradually he becomes aware that he is seeing only part of the picture; and through a series of contacts. he discovers the exploited classes of Urrastian society. and in time gets involved in a recognizably socialist uprising against established authority. A different set of cirumstances now conspire against his work. and the novel clearly shows the extent to which scientific experimentation and theorizing are the products not just of the established base of scientific knowledge. but of social and personal constraints as well.

He eventually completes his work in a short period of intense effort: and even as he produces it. it is stolen by fellow scientists. His part in the uprising is explained away. (His eminence as an intergalactic scientist pro­tects him in a situation which parallels that of the Rusliian dissident Andrei Sakharov.) Yet he returns home optimistic. secure in the knowledge that the events surrounding his visit to Urras have done much to set Anarres back to bdonian ways. Realizing that his major period of scientific creativity is almost certainly behind him, he looks forward to a life devoted more fully to social and domestic concerns within a setting which he is convinced is a preferable alternative to that on Urras.

Unlike Hoyle's Kingsley, Shevek is aware that society and science are inseparable. and that social change cannot be affected by people possessed of scientific knowledge and repute who merely want to act "from the outside," By juxtaposing accounts of Shevek's life on Anarres and on Urras, Le Guin clearly exhibits scientific work to be integral to socio-historical evolution, and the technology dependent on science to be subject to the same socio­historical forces. Methodology emerges as a social process. a product not only of knowledge but also of ideology and social constraints.

The Dispossessed is probably the aptest instance for demonstrating the nature of a scientist's activities. We have in Shevek a person who is aware of how familial. social. sexual. and scientific constraints impinge upon his work both in science and in society. His "social mobility" allows the novel to explore alternative situations in which a scientist can work. Shevek is no laboratory-cloistered recluse: though he does need periods when he works alone. he also needs time to participate in society at large. By narrating the novel from his point of view, Le Guin keeps the reader aware that what Shevek does as a scientist is affected by a number of different but interrelated factors in his social and individual existence(s).

5. A science education which attempts to face the contradiction that we have drawn attention to would be radical in the sense that its values would oppose 326

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the present status quo. SF, in drawing attention to the value systems created within parallel worlds, provides one vehicle for the analysis of science in social contexts; and hecause of the educational f1exihility of the "vehicle:' it provides a valuahle starting point for clarifying the values of teacher and student alike.

However. to achieve a radical science education. much more than an analysis of SF's "scientific" content and social commentary is required. A radical science education considers the context of science. and its content includes not only text-book science and extrapolations from current scientific theory hut also the particular science of a particular society.

Science cannot proper(I' he studied as an apolitical or asocial entity. It is shaped hy social factors and responds to social change; and its discoveries find expression in social and political terms. Analysis of the symhiotic rela­tionship that ohtains hetween science and society is the raison detre of a radical science education.

The aim of such an education is not principally to educate in science hut to educate ahoul science in a particular socielY. Behind this undertaking is the helief that. as knowledge production in science is a result of social action. scientific knowledge (Jjke other forms of knowledge) cannot he idealized or extracted from its social context. A radical science education is essentially a study of relationships. first of man to his environment. and secondly of man to a self whose conception science and technology is continually altering.

We have already suggested how SF might further the educational analy­sis of the symhiotic connection hetween science and society. Initially. such an analysis might he appended to a conventional science course. perhaps taught hy the science teacher. This might prove to he a rirst slep in the direction of interdisciplinary and integrated approaches involving significant changes in curriculum: in course structure. teaching methods. and stance toward in­structional material.

There are two ohstacles in the way of the kind of petl'lgogical changes we are advocating. The first is instructors' attitudes. The teacher would need to have a commitment to the notion of a radical science education. Her or his values would have to he consistent with those altaching to a social view of science. A teacher who holds strong socio-political convictions supporting the elitist view of science could hardly he expected to emhrace the notion of radical science with enthusiasm. And even those teachers who are sympa­thetic to such ideals may find it difficult to reorient themselves method­ologically. Arter all. the methods and patterns of teaching communicate values as much as the explicit course content does; and to espouse one set of values through the curriculum and another set through the methods and procedures of classroom communication involves a contradiction that stu­dents readily perceive - and are confused hy.

Secondly. there is the prohlem of imitatahle models. Examples of con­tent treated in the style of a radical science education are few and far hetween. Furthermore. it is quite unlikely that a curriculum giving explicit recognition to values opposed to the present political and social status quo would gain wide support. Progress toward curricular reforms conducive to radical science education is therefore likely to he slow.

Our own convictions on these matters have heen inspired hy recent efforts to reintegrate the sociology of science into the sociology of knowledge and thus raise questions ahout the possihle "social factors" which interact with the conlenl of scientific knowledge. Those attempts. as Klima notes. were in turn stimulated hy Kuhn's The SlruclUre of'Scientific Rel'olulions. 327

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whose central hypothesis, that

'normal' science is governed, not by a timeless, ahistorical and generally appli­cable canon of methodological rules leading to cumulative growth, but rather by specific traditions or 'paradigms' which tightly and with relative arbitrariness circumscribe the range of legitimate problems and methods of problem-solving. has opened the search for social factors conditional for the selection and acceptance of such 'paradigms: The result is to re-open (at least for non­Marxist sociologists), the problematic of the 'social roots' of scientific thought.1'

We have taken the view that part of the answer to the problematic connec­tion between science and society is provided by studies which contend that the form of scientific knowledge production has changed in ways which reflect industrialization, bureaucratization, and the political needs of capital­ism. Here we would agree with the suggestion of Johnston and Robbins that "external forces are not only responsible for I this form of] social division of labour but have had a direct influence on the differentiation through cogni­tive specialisation." The type of occupational control in science affects the type of knowledge produced, the structure of science as a whole, and the structure of the individual specialties.N • "Until very recently," B. Dixon writes, "anyone who asked the question 'what is science for'!' could simply be categorized as foolish, provocative or ignorant. ".10 Science curricula will be faced with the very same question. Is research and development in science (mostly government funded) directed to providing a better life in terms of health, housing, and transportation'! Or are such vast sums directed toward the development of "more sophisticated weapons anq counterinsurgency technology (to protect corporate interests abroad) and towards automation, information-handling technology, and technologically-induced obsolescence (to maintain the viability of the economic system at home)'''!-''

On a practical level, the content of a radical science education should be structured so as to enable mastery of the technological world. Wherever science and technology affect daily life, students would have the information necessary to understand and cope with them. This means that the chemistry of making cement, the nutrition of bodily health, the physics of the refrigera­tor, the biology of pregnancy, and so forth should constitute part of a student's education. On a more philosophical level it means that the question of "what is science forT' permeates the study of science. The discussion of the topic of energy (conservation, transformation. application, and sources) cannot be separated from analysis of electrical power demands. pollution. oil and uranium, radio-active waste, and political control of the means of distri­bution. The study of cell biology and genetics should not avoid talking about genetic manipulation, sickle-cell anemia. ethnic weapons, and health-care delivery systems. The physics of transistors and electronic systems cannot be divorced from the automated battlefield or long-range surveillance systems.

A radical science education, we repeat. attempts to educate in and about science in a particular society. An education in science retains much of the "hard" science of present science texts; indeed, this fundamental elemenl of "hard science" is central to the kind of education we are proposing. Whal needs to be stressed is that an education in science should be carried out conjointly with an education about science in a particular society. The emphases should be on both the "social responsibility" of science and the social roots of scientific thought as the latter interacts with its political. economic, and cultural determinants. Only in that way can the contradiction between science-teaching and the realities of science be disposed of. 328

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NOTES

I. R.M. Young. "Science is Social Relations." Radical Science loumal. 4 119701:00-129.

2. See. for example. R. Johnston. "Contextual Knowledge: A Model for the Overthrow of the Internal/External Dichotomy in Science." AU.I·tralian and Nell'

7ealand lournal of SocioloR.l'. 12 (197h):l93- 20.1: R. M. Young. "The Historiographic and Ideological Contexts of the Nineteenth Century Dehate on Man's Place in Nature." in M. Teich and R.M. Young. eds .. Challf!,inf!, Persl'ectil·e.l in the HistOf:\, of Sci('nc(' ILondon. 19731. PI'. 344-4.111; and P. Foreman, "Weimar Culture. Causality and Quan­tum Theory 19111-1927," Hi.Horical Studies in the Physical Scienc('.~ . .1 (19711:2-22.'1. See also. B. Barnes. Scientific K IIow/edf!,e and Sociolof!,ical Thenr\' (London. 19741.

.I. J.R. Ravetz, Scientific Knowledf!.e and It.l Sncial Prohlem.~ (Middlesex. 19711. 4. L. Sklair. Orf!,allized Knol\'ledf!,e (Suffolk. 197.11-'i. M. Blissett. Politics in Science /Boston. 1972). p. ix. h. Hilary and Steven Rose. "The Incorporation of Science." in Tlw I'o/ilical

/:l'{)lIomr 0/ Science. ed. H. & S. Rose (London. 197hl. p . .II. 7. A. Gorz. "On the Class Character of Science and Scientists." in The I'olilical

l.('(I//()ml· ()/ Science (see note hI. p. h2. X. S. Toulmin. "From Form to Function: Philosophy and History of Science in

Ihe 19.'10\ and Now:' Daedalus. 1M 11477): 14.'\-h2. lJ. R. Hessen. "The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Prillcipia:' in N.

Ilukharin 1'1 al .. Science al the Crossrnads: Paren From Ihe Second IlIlel'llllliolllll Cfll/~I'('S\ ollhe Hislor\' 01 Science and Technologl' l'n/lLondon. 19.111. PI'. 1.'11-229: 1". Manuel. 1'0 1'1 rail o/Isaac Nell/on ICamhridge. 14hll): R.K. Merton. "Science. Teeh· n(ll,,~y and S()ciety in Seventeenlh Century England." OSIRIS. 4 114.11\):414-'I0'l-sum­marized in G. Basalla. The Rise 01 A/odel'l1 Science: Inl"l'I1al or Frlel'l/al FuC/on:' ILexington. MA: 14hHI.

10. M. Polanyi. The Logic ofl.iherty (Chicago, 14'111, p. hh. II. M. Polanyi. "The Repunlic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theon· ...

. l1illl'rl'O. I (1%2):.'14-7.1. 12. For further discussion see E.E. Nunan. "History and Philosophy of Science

and Science Teaching: A Revisit," Australian Science Teachen loumal . . 12 114771:0."'-71. See also P. Feyerahend. Against Method (London. 197.'1): D. Phillips, "Paradigms and Ineommensurahility." Theon' and Society. 2 (1975):J7-hl: B. Barnes. op. cil. Inote 21: M. Foucault. The Archaeologl' of Knoll'ledge (London. 1474): and T. Caunihan. "Fpistemology of Science: Feyeranend and Lecourt:' Fconomr alld Sociell·. S 11'J7h):74-110.

1.1. Quoted in S.F. Mason. A IIi.HOIY olfhe Sciellces INY. 14h21. p. 2S4. 14. M. Charlesworth. "The Myth of Science:' Nation Rel·iell'. 20 Jan.·1 Feh.

1'I7H. p. II. I:;. S. Rose and H. Rose. "The Radicalisation of Science:' in The 1'0 iiI iCllI

Fl")//()ml' o{ Science. p. 2. 10. R.D. Toney. The Amt'rican Ideologl' o( National Sen'ices I Pittshurgh. 14711.

r. xiii. 17. A. Gorz. "Of the Class Character of Science and Scientists." in The P{)lilical

'-('ollomr of .)ci.-nce. p. hI. 11\. S. Bowles and H. Gintis. Schooling in Cal'ilaiisl America 1 London. 147hl:

and R. Sharp and A. Green. Education and Social Control (London. 147'11. 19. P. Parrinder. "The Black Wave: Science and Social Consciousness in Mod­

ern Science Fiction." Radical Science lournal . .'1 114771:.17-01. 20. This and suhsequent citations from Lem's hook refer to The IlIl'illeihle,

,rans. Wendayne Ackerman (London: Sidgwick & Jackson. 197.'\1. 21. This and suhsequent citations from Lem's hook refer to Solaris. (rans.

Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox (London: Faher & Faher, 1971 I. 22. This and sunsequent citations from Fisk's hook refer to Trillions (London:

Penguin. 147.11-2.1. See. A. Koestler, The Act of' Creation (London, 19MI. p. Jill. 329

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24. This and subsequent citations from Hoyle's book refer to The Black Cloud (London: Heinemann, 1957).

25. See D.A. Sciama, "The Limits of Space and Time: Exploding Black Holes and the Origin of the Universe." Daedalus. 106 (1977):33-40.

26. This and subsequent citations from Le Guin's book refer to The Dispossessed (London: Panther. 1975).

27. A. Einstein. Relativity; The Special and General Theory. 15th ed. (London: Methuen, 1952), p. 156.

28. R. Klima, "Scientific Knowledge and Social Control in Science; the Appli· cation of a Cognitive Theory of Behaviour to the Study of Scientific Behaviour," in R. Whitley, ed., Social Processes of Scientific Development (London, 1974).

29. See R. Johnston and D. Robbins. "The Development of Specialties in Industrialized Science," The Sociological Review, 25 (1977):87-109.

30. B. Dixon. What is Science For? (Suffolk, UK. 1976), p. II. 31. "Science Teaching: Towards an Alternative" (symposiuml. Science for the

People. 4 (Sept. 1972):9. 330

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Reading 2 An accidental astronaut: Learning with science fiction

Noel Gough

N. Gough, 'An accidental astronaut: Learning with science fiction', in G. Willis & W. H. Schubert (eds), Reflections from the Heart of Educational Inq~iry: Understanding

Curriculum and Teaching through the Arts, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 1991, pp.312-20.

Many of my favorite stories are known popularly as "science fiction" (SO,l and some of them have also become very sig­nificant in my work as a teacher educator and curriculum scholar. The value I place on certain sf stories, and my fondness for the genre as a whole, has resulted from a succession of fortunate accidents, each of which has predisposed me to take advantage of the next .

. Childhood Dreams

One of the more plausible stories of modern biological science suggests that our inherited characteristics and the circumstan­ces of our conception result from many chance occurrences. If that is so, then chance has it that I was born a boy in England in 1944 and that I have a brother six years older than me. A result of the latter accident is that my brother's reading preferences were an early influence on my own tastes. Thus, at the age of six I was not only following the adventures of Rupert Bear (and other favorites of my agemates) but also sampling books and comics preferred by older readers. Among these was the boys' weekly paper Eagle with its lead comic strip, "Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future." Dan Dare's colorful exploits were the stuff of many a boy's dreams in the drabness and depression of postwar Britain. He took the values of our heroic Royal Air Force into space and, more importantly, his adventures were set in a future from which science and technology had eliminated many of the most demoralising aspects of our existence. When I embarked with Dan Dare's Interplanetary Space Fleet to venture to Venus and beyond I escaped from the food shortages and rations, the cold and damp houses (coal was rationed too), and the runny noses and congested lungs that were endemic to England's soggy, smoggy atmosphere. 312

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My brother and I were lucky to be acquainted with Dan Dare, because in 1951, only a year after his comic strip debut. our family emigrated to Australia, where Eagle was not widely dis­tributed. This brief acquaintanceship was enough to whet my brother's appetite for sf. which grew steadily in the ensuing years. My own literary tastes were more diverse. but my brother's collection of sf formed a large proportion of our shared library and the Grand Masters of the genre-Isaac Asimov. Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke. and Robert Heinlein-soon became familiar names. However. my knowledge of their work and of sf in general remained superficial for many years. Indeed. between 1950 and 1967 I read nothing which appreciably altered the impressions of sf that I had formed on my flights of fantasy with Dan Dare. The

. oilly value I attributed to sf beyond that of escapist entertainment was its celebration of the virtues of science per se.

During my high school years I began to reject quite conscious­ly the Christian theology of my parents and to put my faith in science. By the time I had completed my undergraduate degree in biology I was confident that the meaning of life resided in neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. Had I been asked to do so. I could have defended assiduously the scientific optimism of my Dan Dare daydreams. But I had no reason to articulate such a defence, and I certainly did not recognise the complementartties between my faith in science and my childhood dreams.

Childhood's End

One day in 1967, when browsing in the Education library at the University of Melbourne, I came across a small collection ofnovels on educational themes - The Prime oj Miss Jean Brodie, Black­board JWlgle, To Sir With Love and the like. Among them was Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke (1953). I had read and enjoyed several of Clarke's short stories in the anthologies of sf that I occasionally had borrowed from my brother, and I thus recognised the incongruity of his novel in this collection. Childhood's End is not about schooling, and I suspect that it came to be in the Education library by accident, perhaps on the strength of its title alone. Whatever the reason for its presence, my curiosity was aroused and I took a chance on reading Childhood's End. It is no· exaggeration to say that doing so changed my life. 313

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Childhood's End begins just as humans are about to take their first steps into space. The space race and the anns race are halted by the arnval of extraordinarily powerful alien beings who become known as the MOverlords". At first the Overlords are a mysterious presence, and they hide their physical form from humans for fifty years (it turns out that they resemble medieval conceptions of Satan). During that time they take benevolent control of the world and eliminate ignorance, poverty, disease. crime. and the fear of war. But the children of this new golden age are strange. They begin to dream of floating among distant suns and wandering on alien planets and. eventually. all they seem to do is dream. The Overlords reveal that their purpose on earth can be likened to Mmidwives attending a difficult birth ... their duty being to super­vise and protect the children through a metamorphosis which will "bring something new and wonderful into the world." Eventually the children are all that remain of humankind and. in the book's powerful metaphysical climax. they dematerialise-along with the earth itself-to become what their dreams prefigured: the children are at one with an omnipresent cosmic MOvermind." The Overlords observe this fmal stage of human evolution with a deeply ambiguous sense of loss: for all of their technological sophistication. they are incapable of joining the Overmind. As one of their number says: MYes. we are the midwives. But we ourselves are barren" (Clarke 1953, 153).

I recall being fascinated and oddly eXhilarated by my first reading of Childhood's End. I was surprised by the apparent' paradox that a story about the end of the world could seem so hopeful, but I felt myself empathising with Clarke's aspirations for what humankind might become. I was also surprised that a story founded on the mystical concept of human transcendence could remain within the bounds of scientific plausibility and, moreover. be told using such stereotypical props of sf as extrater­restrial beings and spaceships and other wonderful machines.

I have revisited Childhood's End many times since that first reading, and its literary flaws have become more apparent. Human characterisation is minimal and the dialogue is often stilted, but I am still moved by the predicament of the Overlords and share Clarke's sense of wonder as he imaginatively docu­ments the marvels of the universe and dramatises his beliefs in the possibility of human transcendence. Clarke Is at his best when his mind's eye is on the big picture, as it is in his depiction 314

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of the last moments of the earth's existence (as seen by the departing Overlords):

In. a soundless concussion of light. Earth's core gave up its hoarded energies. For a little wWle the gravitational waves crossed and re-crossed the Solar System, disturbing ever so slightly the orbits of the planets. Then the Sun's remaining children pursued their ancient paths once more, as corks fioating on a placid lake ride out the tiny ripples set in motion by a falling stone. (Clarke 1953, 188-189)

It is not just the metaphoric reference to water that reminds me of the climactic lines of Herman Melville's Moby Dick (K ••• then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago"). Clarke's lines may lack Melville'S fluidity and economy, but both writers know how to put humankind into perspective-against vistas of such magnitude and magnificence that events like the sinking of the Pequod and the dematertallsation of the earth appear as infiniteSimal fluctua­tions in vast sweeps of time and space. However. through their respective central characters. each wrtter also demonstrates that such events are by no means trivial. Thus, the sombre tone of the concluding passages of ChUdhood.'s End does not invite us to mourn for the earth but reflects the tragic meaning of its destruc­tion for the Overlord Karellen:

There was nothing left of Earth. They had leeched away the last atoms of its substance. It had nourished them. through the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphOSiS. as the food stored in a grain of wheat feeds the infant plant while it climbs towards the Sun ...

Six thousand million kilometers beyond the orbit of Pluto. Karellen sat before a suddenly darkened screen. The record was complete. the mission ended: he was homeward bound for the world he had left so long ago. The weight of centuries was upon him. and a sadness that no logic could dispel ...

For all their achievements. thought Karellen. for all their mastery of the physical universe, his people were no better than a tribe that had passed its whole existence upon some fiat and dusty plain. Far off were the mountains. where power and beauty dwelt, where the thunder sported above the glaciers and the air was dear and keen. There the sun still walked. trans-figuring the peaks with glory. when all the land below was 315

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wrapped in darkness. And they could only watch and wonder: they could never scale those heights. (Clarke 1953, 189)

Childhood's End altered my conception of what science fiction could be and stimulated my curiosity about the place of scientific rationality in the human imagination. J began to read more widely in the literature of science-not only sf but other stories of scientific inquiry and the history and philosophy of science that lay claim to being "nonfiction". I also began to use sf in the courses I taught in teacher education, particularly studies in teaching biology and science. After Childhood's End my cosmological explorations were no longer accidental, though it took yet another chance occurrence to forge the links that now bind my affection for sf with my work in curriculum studies.

A Child in Time

In search of further revelatory experiences I returned to my brother's collection of classic and contemporary sf. At first I was disappointed by the scarcity of such revelations in the stories told by the most popular sf authors. Fortunately, some of Arthur C. Clarke's best work appeared ill the years that Immediately fol­lowed my fIrst reading of Childhood's End. The 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (for which Clarke coauthored the screenplay with director Stanley Kubrick), the short story "A Meeting \,,;th Medusa" (1971), the novel Rendezvous with Rama (1973) were every bit as awe-inspiring as ChUdhood's End. and each in some ways surpassed it. Thus sensitised, I could hardly fail to notice that one of Clarke's nonflction books. Pro.fi1es oJthe Future (1973). was listed in 1975 as a suggested text for an elective course. "Educating for the Future". within the teacher education program I was then coordinating. The course was about to lapse because the staff member who was responsible for it had suddenly reSigned. Shortly thereafter. I took the opportunity to teach and to further develop this course, now known as "Futures in Edu­cation". and it has remained an important focus for my work to this day.

Since Childhood 'sEnd I have encountered the works of several sf authors whose artistry with the written word totally eclipses Clarke's. Of these, Ursula Le Gum has done most to nurture the germ of personal consciousness that was planted by Clarke, the realisation that Imaginative journeys into vast reaches of time and 316

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space can be much more than escapist fantasies. We can return from such journeys genuinely moved. Le Guin provides a useful analogy in her novel. Always Coming Home (1985. 10-11): a girl is on a journey from which she makes a short detour to Visit her family in a nearby town. She recalls. WI had been to Madidinou many times. of course, but this time the town looked altogether different. since I was on a journey beyond it". The best sf has a similar effect: it makes the present-and particularly the moral choices and Judgments that we perceive within it-look Mal_ together different." This appUes as much to the stories we tell in curriculum study as to any other aspect of our lives.

Le Guin sets novels like The Left Hand oJDarlmess (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974) in the far future, in carefully con­structed fictional universes. In each of these stories Le Guin creates unfamiliar yet magnificently realised environme.nts Which are integral to the interplays among her characters (who mayor may not be human but who are always characters and not mere ciphers). The haunting clarity of Le Guin's prose allows simple visual images and motifs - a shadow on snow, the play of sunlight in a courtyard-to be woven almost imperceptibly into complex metaphors which resonate with the actions and existence of her subjects. The wholeness of Le Guin's vision of alien worlds invites us to accept them as familiar and subtly alters our perceptions of oU1iselves and our own times and places. I certainly believe that I returned from Gethen, the wintry setting of The Left Hand oj Darkness, and from Le Guin's vividly personalised account of a solitary human envoy's interactions with its androgynous in­habitants, \vith a more sensitive and enlightened view of the politics of human sexuality and gender.

An added attraction of Le Guin's sf is that It has also been a source of questions for my own cuniculum inquiries. For ex­ample, in Always Coming Home, she tells stories of the Kesh, a people who wmight be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California" and whose stories are written as translations of wtheir voices speaking for themselves." One brief stoty is told by the grandchild of a man called Fairweather. We are told that during Fairweather's adolescence Whe learned ar­boriculture with his mother's brother, a scholar of the Planting Lodge ... and with orchard trees of all kinds." Fairweather lived in a'time and place when Mnone of the Valley pears was very good. all were subject to cankers, and most needed inigation to bear 317

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well." He asked people in the north for help in obtaining different varieties and, by crossbreeding northern seedlJngs with a pear tree he found growing wild above the oak forests, "he came upon a strong, small, and drought-hardy tree with excellent fruit ... 1llis is the brown pear grown in most orchards and gardens, and people call it the Fairweather pear." There is much more to this deceptively simple story, which occupies less than two pages of a long novel, than can be examined here. But one of the story's chief delights is Le Guin's postscript to it:

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE:

... he learned arboriculture with his mother's brother . .. and. with orchard trees oj all kinds.

We would be more likely to say that he leamedftom his uncle about orchard trees;- but this would not-be a fair translation of the repeated suffix oud. with, together with. To leam with an uncle and trees implies that leaming is not a transfer of some­thing by someone to someone. but is a relationship. Moreover, the relationship is considered to be recIprocal. Such a point of view seems-at hopeless oddS-with the distinction of subject and object considered essential to Science. Yet it appears that [Fairweather'sl genetic experiments or manipulations were tech­nically skillful, and that he was not ignorant of the theodes involved, and it is certain that he achieved precisely what he set out to achieve. And the resulting strain of tree was given his name: a type case, in our vocabulaIY, of Man's control over Nature. This phrase. however, could not be translated into Kesh. which had no word meaning Nature except she, being: and anyhow the Kesh saw the Fairweather pear as the result of a collaboration between a man and some pear trees. The dif­ference of attitude is interesting and the absence of capital letters perhaps not entirely trivial. [I.e Guin 1985,274-275)

The difference in attitude is indeed interesting: moreover, it is the dYJerence between the Kesh view of learning and our own that gives the story a critical edge. Fairweather's story. and Le Guin's translation of it, questions the taken-for-grantedness of existing conceptions of curriculwn and learning, and It matters little whether the Kesh exist "in fact" or that they are a speculative fiction of Le Guin's imagination. The facts of the story's existence and of our critical responses to It are more than enough to provide questions for curriculum inquiry. As Le Guin says in a preface to Always Coming Home: 318

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The difficulty of translation from a language that doesn't yet exist is considerable. but there's no need to exaggerate it. The past. after all. can be quite as obscure as the future, The ancient Chinese book called Tao teh ching has been translated into English dozens of times. and indeed the Chinese have to keep retranslating it Into Chinese at every cycle of Cathay, but no translation can give us the book that Lao Tze (who may not have existed) wrote. All we have is the Tao teh ching that Is here. now. And so wlth translations from a literature of the (or a) future, The fact that it hasn't yet been written. the mere absence of a text to translate. doesn't make all that much difference, What was and what may be lie. like children whose faces we cannot see, in the arms of silence. All we ever have is here. now. (Le Guin 1985, xi)

Le Guin thus reminds us that the value of a narrative excursion to other times has little to do with its status as historical or scientific 'fact' or speculative fiction, What matters is the wisdom and virtue that may grow in us as we respond critically and creatively to such stories here and now. in the present within which our pasts and fu tures are enfolded.

The essence of what I have learned from the stories of Arthur C. Clarke. Ursula Le Guin. and other writers of sf is that I am a child in time. They have helped me to understand that I am at the centre of my own hIstory and have helped me to locate this his,tory somewhere-and somewhen-radically indetennincite in any conception I might have of the evolving universe. The stories of science-astronomy. geology. ecology. and evolutionary biol­ogy-opened mymlnd to vast perspectives of space and time past. but in those stories I seemed to be situated at the edge of reality. or uncomfortably perched on the tip of time's arrow. with a narrow and restricted view. The stories of science fiction have helped me to realise the vast imaginative perspectives of space and time future. It Is a humbling experience to sense oneself as a child in time-as a small. wondertng. growing. and purposeful speck of consciousness-indeterminately and ambIguously located (but not lost) within an infinite tlmescape. And here. now. it feels like a good and useful metaphor for what I hope I am being and becoming as I tell my own stories of curriculum. teaching. and learning with my own children. colleagues. and colearners. 319

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NOTE

1. Most connoisseurs. critics. and creators of science fiction prefer the abbre\iation Msr. to Msci-fi.· An advantage of Msr is that it can also be taken W denote -speculative fiction ft (an all-embracing term which includes any stories set in the future. regardless of whether or not they are furnished with the scientific or technological hardware of conven­tional science fiction) and/or ·science fantasy' (stories which are osten­sibly set in the future but which are characterised by magic and fantasy of the faery sort). .

REFERENCES

Clarke. A. C. 1953. Childhood's end. New York: Ballantine. (Page refer­ences are to the 1956 edition published by Pan Books. London.)

- - -. 1971. A Meeting with Medusa. In The windJrom the SWl. London: Victor Gollancz.

- - -. 1973. Rendezoous with Rama. London: Victor Gollancz. - -- ------

-:.... -....:.. -r973. Profiles oTthe-FUture-:-re0.sed edition. London: Victor Gollancz. -

Le GUin. Ursula 1969. The Left Hand oj DarJmess. New York: Ace.

- - -. 1974. The Dispossessed. New York: Harper and Row.

- - -. 1985. Always Coming Home. New York: Harper and Row. (Page references are to the 1986 edition published by Victor Gollancz. London.) 320

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Reading 3 Reprise: Science fiction, fictions of science, and primatology

Donna Haraway

D. J. Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, Routledge, New York, 1989, pp.368-82, 430-1. (References not included)

Reading Primatology as Science Fiction: The Second Foundation and Stanford's Second Primate Project, 1983-1984

However, because the genetic interests of individuals are not identical (unless they are clones), conflicts of interest perpetually endanger the survival of cooperative relationships. (Smuts, Cheney, Seyfarth, Wrangham, and Struhsaker 1987: 297)

, , unless they are clones": Surely, this is an innocent parenthetical excep­tion, nothing but a punctuated precaution for hominid zoologists pro­fessionally alert (Q the array of modes of reproduction and replication

in the living world, where clones appear naturally in many species, for example, among the colonial insects. Even in the stodgy, conservative primate order, itself a kind of right-wing reaction to the publicly visible, widespread, and baroque practices among fungi and invertebrates, identical twins and kinky replicative habits occur, if infrequently and generally only in tropical forests. Or in laboratories. Laboratories are the material and mythic space of modem science, and the naturalistic field is one of the laboratories of modern primatology. Indeed, the field has been primate science's privileged semiotic center.

The primate field, naturalistic and textual, has been a site for elaborating and contesting the bio-politics of difference and identity for members of industrial and post-industrial cultures. Cloning is simultaneously a literal natural and a cultural 368

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technology, a science fiction staple, and a mythic figure for the repetition of the same, for a stable identity and a safe route through time seemingly outside human reach. Evolutionary biology's bottom line on difference is succinctly stated in the quotation opening this conclusion: in the end, non-identity is antagonistic; it always threatens "the survival of cooperative relationships."ln the end, only the sign of the Same, of the replication of the one identical to itself, seems to promise peace. Can patriarchal monotheistic cultures ever allow another primal slory?

Using Isaac Asimov's imagination of the Second Found4titm to set the stage, I would like to begin the conclusion to Primau Visions with a return to its recurring themes of repetition, identity, cooperation, whole, difference, change, conflict, fragment, reproduction, sex, and mind. Running through the weave of these themes has been the thread of preoccupation with biological and political questions of survival, catastrophe, and extinction. Explicit in the opening quotation above, questions of difference are questions about survival, for both fragments and wholes. Prima to logy has been a rich cultural fabric for exploring these matters. "Teddy Bear Patriarchy," "The Bio-politics of a Multicultural Field," "Mothering as a Scientist for National Geographic," "Remodeling the Human Way of Life," and "The Politics of Being Female" have all turned repeatedly on narratives of the bio-politics of difference and identity in large dramas of twentieth-century history, reaching from pre-World War II African colonialism through post-nuclear and post-colonial struggles over race and gender. Questions about the nature of war, technology, power, and com­munity echo through the primate literature. Given meaning through readings of the bodies and lives of our primate kin, who were semiotically placed in allochronic time and allotopic space, reinvented origins have been figures for reinvented possi­ble futures. Primatology is a First World survival literature in the conditions of twentieth-century global history.

In Asimov's Second Foundation (1964 [1953]), the Seldon Plan for speeding up the return of collective advanced galactic civilization has reached a critical point. Foreseeing the decay of the present Empire, before his death Harry Seldon invented the science capable of predicting social patterns from human interactions in vast masses, a discourse he called Psychohistory. Seldon predicted and manipulated one gametic fragment for the new order and planted the second essential germ cell in the interstices of the fragmenting old Empire. Located "at opposite ends of the galaxy," the first fragment represented science and technology, and the other nurtured advanced mental powers. But the galaxy'S shape makes the meaning of their relative location hopelessly ambiguous; the two foundations might be in the same place, yet unknown to each other. They might be mirror-image clones, more than haploid fragments. They turn out to relate as center and periphery, nucleus and margin. The Second Foundation finally controlled the meanings and fate of the First Foundation. These spatial ambiguities about the relation of fragments that might be clones, gametes, or parts of the same cell can be metaphors in narratives of the relations of variant explanatory frameworks in scientific repetition, fertiliza­tion, or succession. In the Second Foundation, a sterile mutant, the Mule, appears by chance in the story. He is the unique event that the Psycho historians could not have predicted, and this mutation threatens to undermine the Seldon Plan. The Mule has tremendous mental powers for controlling others' minds, and he puts his power to work conquering the First Foundation and searching for the Second Foundation to add it to his upstart and monstrous empire based on violence and conquest. 369

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Ultimately, the psychohistorians of the Second Foundation overcome the Mule's power, restoring the hegemony of their mental talents needed to k.nit together a cooperative new civilization.

Asimov's story provides a loose-fitting but still suggestive way to read the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences' second Primate Project in 1983-84, in comparison and contrast with its twin, complement, and predecessor, the first Primate Project in 1962-63. Both projects took place at the prestigious Center located near Stanford University; the Center may be imagined to be a kind of real­time Institute for Psychohistory, where accounts of the foundations of social and cognitive life are regularly reinvented by selected cultural authorities. Throughout Primate Visions, science fiction has provided one of the lenses for reading primatolog­ical texts. Mixing, juxtaposing, and reversing reading conventions appropriate to each genre can yield fruitful ways of understanding the production of origin narra­tives in a society that privileges science and technology in its constructions of what may count as nature and for regulating the traffic between what it divides as nature and culture.

The field-defining, synthetic books produced from each project's year of study, writing, and seminars are maps to changing explanatory frameworks for under­standing the relations of pans to wholes and sameness to difference in post-war primatology, as well as for understanding network.s of competition, cooperation, and professional reproduction among primatologists. These books, Primate Beltav­ior: Field Studies of Monheys and Apes (DeVore 1965a) and Primate Societies (Smuts et al 1987), mark critical reinventions of what may count scientifically as primate society. On one level, the second Primate Project was a deliberate repetition of the first, the next generation, a reproduction, a kind of duplicated cultural genetic region, with mutations coding for a novel but affiliated end product, whose substitu­tions and homologies can be identified, and whose function remains the recognition of difference between self and non-self, human and animal. The second primate year also dramatized the marginalization of the major paradigms and the social networks of the first project. The second project was simultaneously a nucleus directing translations of the primate story, a germinal fragment of a whole, a highly mutated clone, and the successor. Primate Societies is located at the opposite end of the galaxy of post-war primate field studies from Primate Behavior. But the opposition is based on an identity and repetition. The texts occupy the same field; they are in the same place. And for each, what counts as the core and motor of primate social life is at stake. The dynamics of cooperation and competition are endlessly elaborated in a repeating but differentiated prima to logical survival literature.

Both primate years at the Palo Alto Center and the resulting books owed many of their conditions of existence to the same powerful paternal figure in the biomedically oriented behavioral sciences, especially the endocrinological and neurosciences and experimental psychiatry, David Hamburg. Hamburg and Sherwood Washburn at the University of California at Berkeley collaborated to organize the first primate project. Washburn's favored former student, Irven DeVore, played a large role in planning the project year; and he edited the resulting volume, which synthesized and exhibited the dominant frameworks for most United States primate field an­thropology for many years. At the time of the Primate Project in 1962~3, Hamburg was the head of the Psychiatry Department at Stanford University'S School of Medicine, where he was responsible for the department's redirection to a much 370

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more experimental approach. Washburn was then entering the high plateau of the success that his "plan" would achieve for bringing together primate field studies, functional comparative anatomy, and studies of fossils. Stress was the multivalent concept for bringing together body, mind, evolution, and health in the Washburn­Hamburg vision. "Stress" was a widespread, complex element of post-Hiroshima American Cold War discourse on the relation of human beings to their technological products and animal inheritance. Stress was about cultural perceptions of the traffic between nature and human society and about the connections between body and mind. Stress was part of a discourse about the prospects of survival for nuclear humanity that also faced deep ecological crisis. The terms of possible human com­munity were at the heart of this post-World War II, universalizing, evolutionary narrative about the origins and biology of conflict and cooperation. The solution was the concept of the "social group" as the principal primate adaptation and the "sharing way of life" as its progressive hominid variant. Difference, signified especially by race in a period of decolonization and civil rights struggles, was con­tained by functionalism and liberalism within an ideology privileging a science­based cultural and political order, reaffirmed in Hamburg's 1983 inaugural lecture as president of the Carnegie Corporation. From the global and local social struggles of the 19605 through the reactionary Reagan years, Hamburg kept the faith that the sharing way of life would be recuperated through international science.

Twenty years after the first primate project, Hamburg, then president of the National Institute of Medicine, invited Barbara Smuts, his former graduate student at Stanford, who was also affiliated with Irven DeVore and his student network at Harvard, to organize the second primate year. [Figure 16.1] Smuts' webs of connections to people from Gombe, Stanford, Harvard, Cambridge (England), and

Figure 16.1 Barbara Smuts with a group of baboons at Gilgil. Barbara Smutsl Anthro- 371 photo. Published with permission.

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several other sites where primatologists evolved or immigrated made her the ideal person to undertake the task. As in the first year, the core of the project was a small group resident at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. They utilized their professional networks to solicit papers broadly. Primate Societies had forty-six contributors, about equal to the total number of primatologists who had done field studies by the mid-I960s. I Twenty contributors to Primate Societies were women, including one of the two Japanese participants (Hiraiwa-Hasegawa Mariko). Substantial gender equality in authority and authorship, relative ethnic homogene­ity, and extensive collective interactions pervade the text of Primate Societies.2 Of the thirty-one people who came together to produce Primate Behavior, four were women (Frances Reynolds; Jane Goodall, who contributed a paper but was not present; Jane Lancaster; and Phyllis Jay). The center of gravity of the first project was Berkeley; the second project was enmeshed in an inter-institutional and inter-site web exemplified by Smuts's many connections. Prominently missing in 1982-83 was anyone from the Washburn network, or indeed from the recent or present primate people at the University of California at Berkeley. 3 The co-editors who spent the year together-Smuts, Cheney, Seyfarth, Wrangham, and Struhsaker-were multiply linked through Robert Hinde at Cambridge, Gombe before 1975, Marler's associates at the Rockefeller University, Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Michigan. The University of California at Davis and the University of Chicago were other well-represented centers of primate work in the volume.

At opposite ends of Darwinism's galaxy, primatology's Second Foundation oper­ated with different enabling explanatory constraints for understanding primate social life compared to the first Primate Project. But like the First Foundation, the links of concepts of mind, body, and community were embedded in a larger dis­course on the nature and meaning of difference and on the prospects for primate survival, including implicitly human survival, in the late twentieth century. One of the dialects or codes for that persisting larger social discourse was evolutionary theory, especially contests for the mantle of Darwin. There was one key contrast in this context between the books from the two primate years that bears directly on the bio-politics of difference in the First and Second Primate Foundations. The contrast centers around the treatment of difference, variation, parts, fragments, and wholes. Ironically, the focus on cooperation, complementary differentiation of parts in a social whole, and the social group as the primate order's defining adapta­tion produced a universalizing and essentializing discourse that finally sharpened narratives of antagonistic difference and preoccupations with dominance and com­petition. Equally ironically, the commitment in Primate Societies to individual selec­tion,4 inclusive fitness doctrines, socioecological analysis, strategic modeling, and similar explanatory resources, ordered in the last instance around the principle of antagonistic rather than complementary difference, produced opposite effects. The evolutionary arguments demanded extensive attention to several factors: situational specificity; extraordinary flexibility at all levels of analysis; alertness to myriad forms of coalition, reciprocity, and cooperation; emphasis on animals' social intelligence and generally rich mental and emotional capacities; major interest in previously relatively invisible kinds of individuals, like the aged or juvenile females; and a sense of the politics of conservation more tempered by awareness of the power­differentiated historical positions and non-harmonious interests of all the those with stakes, human and animal.5 372

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In addition, the foregrounded anthropological, rather than zoological, referent of Primau Behavior had a paradoxical effect of narrowing the sense of possible continu­ities between human and animal, while constraining vision of the specificity and multiplicities in the animals' ways of life. As paradoxical, the greater zoological and ecological emphasis of Primate Societies seems to permit a richer map of connections between human and animal and a more diverse tool kit of available narratives for the animals. There are many reasons for these contrasts between the two books that are not linked to the explanatory strategies and variant developments of Darwinism, not least the accumulated data from twenty more years of field and laboratory studies, more than a decade of highly visible contestation over biological versions of sex and gender in primate studies, and painfully sharpened conservation dilemmas.

However, at root Primate Societies displays a methodological and explanatory commitment to specificity and non-reductive difference that exceeds its bottom-line equation of non-identity ("unless they are clones") with antagonistic opposition. In evolutionary discourse, and indeed much more broadly, reproductive bio-politics are the paradigmatic, iconic condensation of the whole set of narratives about same and different, self and other, one and many. The bio-politics of Primate Societies are about situational specificity; intrinsic explanatory and generic heterogeneity; and the construction, as natural-technical objects of knowledge, of multiple centers of agency and power in always permeable and conditional social wholes. The world of Primate Societies is capable of producing surprises, unexpected and promising ways of narrating the meanings of difference and sameness. Ruled by an orthodox reductionism to antagonistic difference and methodological individualism "in the last instance," the discourse of Primate Societies repeatedly privileges multiplicity, difference ordered by an exuberant array of possibilities, and above all, specificity. The textual richness of Primau Societies-and of the primate and prima to logical practices that enable the text-is vastly in excess of the its explicit law. Here is the interesting aspect of the Second Primate Foundation from the point of view of Primate Visions.

In this sense, I read Primau Societies as an exemplar of a widespread groping in 1980s western bio-political and other cultural discourse for ways to narrate differ­ence that are as deeply enmeshed in feminism, anti-colonialism, and searches for non-antagonistic and non-organicist forms of individual and collective life, as by the hyper-real worlds of late capitalism, nea-imperialism, and the technocratic actualization of masculinist nuclear fantasies. The persistent binarism between an­tagonistic versus complementary or organicist ("cooperative") difference. coded in primate evolutionary biology in terms of the opposition between group selectionism or genidindividual selection, is what is cracking apart in these hydra-headed. medu­soid gropings in the Primate Order.

Let me illustrate this way of reading this recent, well-authorized textbook in primate studies by briefly characterizing fragments of the writing of its first editor. Barbara Smuts. In her book based on her thesis research on baboons at Gil gil , Kenya, Sex and Friendship in Baboons. Smuts (1985) adopted many of the same writing strategies as those analyzed above in the section on Jeanne Altmann. "The Time­Energy Budgets of Dual Career Mothering." The generic heterogeneity in the abrupt juxtapositions of quantitative and highly allegorical and narrative accounts, as well as in the iconography of the photographs. tables, and figures, constantly forced the reader to shift reading conventions. [Figure 16.2] The text's different 373

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FiKure 16.2 Baboon friends. Barbara SmutslAnthrophoto. Published with permission. Smuts narrates, "Such physical intimacy is rare among most male-female pairs, but com­mon among Friends" (1985: 60). In a non-narrative mode, Smuts makes a similar point through measures like the "comparison of the number of Friend dyads in which %AI -%L,- was greater than the same index for Non-Friend males versus the number in which the reverse was true. Sign test: x = 33, Z = 3.96, N = 40, P > .001" (1985: 77). (AI is approaches by the female; L,- is leaves by the female.) Neither the photographic image, the narrative prose, nor the statistical statement constitutes a "value-free," intrinsically "objective," non-language-mediated "fact." All three together structure a miniature scien­tific discursive field.

generic moves did not resolve into a single story. Smuts foregrounded the word "friendship" because she needed its polyvalent connotative loading to represent the animals as she scientifically experienced/constructed them as objects of knowledge. Her account of reproductive politics in the baboons de-centered sex and centered social intelligence and, above all, the agency of the animals. Her principal implicit ideological object of interest was heterosexual friendship. She used all these ele­ments to suggest a story for the transition from animal to human that depended not on the division of labor and economic exchange, but on social, communicative commerce.

In Primate Societies, Smuts (1987a, 1987b) deepened her thematic commitment to multi-contextuality, biological anti-essentialism, multi-species perspectivity, and constant renegotiation of the bio-politics of difference as they are written into primate bodies. In "Sexual Competition and Mate Choice;" she highlighted variabil-ity, complexity, and flexibility, while demoting and contextualizing the explanatory status of dominance. Her systematic attention to female choice led to an extended treatment of the complexities of the bases for female mate selections, for which 374

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individuals and histories, in principle not exhaustively knowable to an observer, counted for a great deal. "Gender, Aggression, and Influence" extended the same thematics. From one point of view, Smuts simply erred in using the word "gender" in her title instead of "sex." Without explicit discussion of the many debates about the culturally specific and contested meanings of sex and gender, she glided within the essay from the term "behavioral sex differences" to "gender." She did not take account of a large body of critical theory that maintains that gender is not about differences, but is about a relationship of power. The concept of sex differences, behavioral or otherwise, reduces an analytic about power to a positivist discourse about roles, properties, or other pre-existent observable!.

But from another point of view, Smuts's "mistake" was the result of her destabiliza­tion of essentialism, and it may be productive within the terrain of feminist decons­tructions of gender. By the time she was through reconstructing biological sex difference, there was no more given biological resource waiting for cultural reforma­tion and appropriation into gender. The entire essay may be read as an argument against biological essentialism in relation to sex. In particular, Smuts makes the concept of "inherent" sex differences impossible to use in discussing differential reproductive strategies within the narratives usually called sociobiological. "Sex" became in Smuts's text a signifier for a dynamic, context-dependent (thus obviously constrained, sensitive to inequalities, and not utopian) array of possibilities. Overall, Smuts's text worked to shift attention away from intrinsic properties of individuals and toward constitutive social interactions and contexts with complex dimensions in time and space. The destabilization of intrinsic difference had especially intriguing effects in a narrative explicitly ruled by the premises of methodological individual­ism in evolutionary theory broadly and in sociobiology particularly. For all their constant strategic thinking, the "individuals" in Smuts's paradoxical text do not pass muster as good methodological individualists. Their boundaries are too permeable and webbed with others'. Internally and externally, these individuals are continu­ously reconstituted in intersecting, partially incongruous, unfinishable patterns. When biology is practiced as a radically situational discourse and animals are experi­enced/constructed as active, non-unitary subjects in complex relation to each other and to writers and observers, the gaps between discourses on nature and culture seem very narrow indeed.

In the Second Foundation's concluding chapter on the "Future of Primate Re­search," the rough analogy to Seldon's Psycho historians and the problem of the dangerous mutant mental power of the Mule seems unavoidable (Cheney et aI1987). The relation of cognitive science and complex social behavior was the primatologists' penultimate topic, just before the concluding essay on conservation and primate survival. The topics and their order-mind and survival-are unsurprising in a discourse that constantly appealed to models of strategic reasoning, originary asym­metries, and evolutionary stable strategies at the heart of evolutionary biology. In evolutionary theory staying in the game is fundamentally a question of reproductive politics. Reproductive politics and communications technologies lie very near each other in this discourse. They are both aspects of strategic reasoning in relation to survival, and they are both emblematic of the breakdown of the hermetically sealed individual. Strategic reasoning is social intelligence; both are part of the technology of communication that has been progressively constructed as a central object of knowledge in twentieth-century life, human, and physical sciences. 375

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In the relation between cognitive science and complex social behavior. communi­cation is the luminous object of attention. And communication is where machine, animal, and human boundaries broke down dramatically in post-World War II popular and scientific discourses. Linguistics. machine communications sciences, social theory. neurobiology, and semiology all inter-digitate and sometimes conflate in contemporary cognitive sciences. Cheney, Seyfarth. Smuts, and Wrangham make the pregnant continuities. communicative commerce, and reproductive politics among animal, human, and machine explicit in their characterization of a research strategy for joining evolution, development, complex social behavior, and cognitive science.

One research strategy, pursued in a variety of forms, has been to investigate "almost minds," such as the minds of children or the "minds" of computer programs, to see what makes them different and what would be needed to elevate them to fully human status. As the chapters in this volume illustrate, nonhuman primates provide an extraordinary diversity of "almost minds" that, in their social interactions with one another, promise to provide unique insights into the study of intelligence .... In their natural habitats, however, primates are uniquely poised to reveal how, in the first instance, some minds gained an advantage over others. (Cheney et al 1987: 494).

In the first instance, in the beginning, there was difference, and so began the struggle of some minds to gain an advantage over others. This is a fragment of strategic narrative, oedipal narrative, and modern technological narrative, where survival-possible futures--is at stake in a techno-fetal world of 'almost minds . .o Do "almost minds" have "half-lives"?

Children, AI computer programs, and nonhuman primates: all here embody "almost minds." Who or what has "fully human status"? As if the answer were self­evident, the adult human scientists who wrote "Future of Primate Research" did not ask that question. And yet, primatology has persistently been about just what "fully human status" will be allowed to mean. The authors quietly embodied the maturations of the "almost minds" that they signaled: adult to child, human to nonhuman primate, scientist to machine artificial intelligence. What is the end, or telos. of this discourse on approximation, reproduction, and communication, in which the boundaries among and within machines. animals. and humans are exceed­ingly permeable? Where will this evolutionary, developmental, and historical com­municative commerce take us in the techno-bio-politics of difference?

To address this question, we must move from reading primatology as science fiction to the next logical step-reading science fiction as primatology. Let me turn to Octavia Butler's novel, Daum. the first in her trilogy on Xenogenesis (1987, 1988), as if it were a report from the primate field in the allotopic space of earth after a nuclear holocaust. Let us look at Daum as the first chapter for the text that might issue from the next primate year, the Third Foundation for the third planet from the sun at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Reading Science Fiction as Primatology: Xenogenesis and Feminism

Lilith: "It won't be a daughter. It will be a thing-not human. It's inside me, and it isn't human," 376

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Ooloi: "The differences will be hidden umil metamorphosis."

"I had gone back to school." [Lilith] said. "I was majoring in amhropology." She laughed bitterly. "I suppose I could think of this as fieldwork-but how the hell do 1 get out of the field?" (Butler 1987: 262-3,91)

Throughout Primate Visions, I have read both popular and technical discourses on monkeys and apes "out of context" (Strathern 1987). My hope has been that the always oblique and sometimes perverse focusing would facilitate revisionings of fundamental, persistent western narratives about difference. especially racial and sexual difference; about reproduction, especially in terms of the multiplicities of generators and offspring; and about survival, especially survival imagined in the boundary conditions of both the origins and ends of history, as told within western traditions of that complex genre. Primate Visioru is replete with representations of representations, deliberately mixing genres and contexts to play with scientific and popular accounts in ways that their "original" authors would rarely authorize (Rabinow 1986: 250). But Primate Visions is not innocent of the intent to have effects on the authorized primate texts in both mass cultural and scientific productions, in order to shift reading and writing practices in this fascinating and important cultural field of meanings for industrial and post-industrial people.

Primate Visioru does not work by prohibiting origin slories, or biological explana­tions of what some would insist must be exclusively cultural matters, or any other of the enabling devices among primate discourses' apparatuses of bodily production. I am not interested in policing the boundaries between nature and culture--quite the opposite, I am edified by the traffic. Indeed, I have always preferred the prospect of pregnancy with the embryo of another species; and I read this "gender"­transgressing desire in primatology's text, from the Teddy Bear Patriarchs' labor to be the father of the game, through Primate Societies' developmental-evolutionary narrative fragment about a heterogeneous sibling group of "almost minds." Gender is kind, syntax, relation, genre; gender is not the transubstantiation of biological sexual difference. The argument in Primate Visioru works by telling and retelling stories in the attempt to shift the webs of intertextuality and to facilitate perhaps new possibilities for the meanings of difference, reproduction, and survival for specifically located members of the primate order-on both sides of the bie-political and cultural divide between human and animal.

Tucked in the margins and endnotes of "Teddy Bear Patriarchy" was a little white girl in Brightest Africa in the early 1920s. Little Alice Hastings Bradley was brought there by Carl Akeley, the father of the game, on his scientific hunt for gorilla, in the hope that her golden-haired presence would transform the ethic of hunting into the ethic of conservation and survival, as "man" and his surrogates, sucked into decadence, stood at the brink of extinction. The gorilla taken during that "last" hunt turned into the Giant of Karisimbi, potent and alone in his reproduction of the true image of man. After death, that gorilla became a clone of the father of the game, whose own life ended at the scene of his dreams. Duplicitous, the little girl turned into James Tiptree, Jr., and Racoona Sheldon, a man and a mother, the female author who could not be read as a woman and who wrote science fiction stories that interrogated the conditions of communication and reproduction of self and other in alien and home worlds. But Tiptree's gender, species, and genre 377

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transfigurations were only beginning to germinate in the child placed in the world still authored by the father of the game and the law of the father.'

But in a post-colonial world of the politics of being female, the earlier margins of possibility can become the main story. Not in the margins of the opening chapter, but at the culmination of Primate Visions, Octavia Butler's speculative/science fiction is preoccupied with forced reproduction, unequal power, the ownership of self by another, the siblingship of humans with aliens, and the failure of siblingship within species. Butler's is a fiction predicated on the natural status of adoption and the unnatural violence of kin. Like Tiptree-and like modern primatologists-Butler explores the interdigitations of human,machine, nonhuman animal or alien, and their mutants in relation to the intimacies of bodily exchange and mental communi­cation. She interrogates kind, genre, and gender in a post-nuclear, post-slavery survival literature. Her fiction, especially in Xenogenesis, is about the monstrous fear and hope that the child will not, after all, be like the parent. There is never just one parent. Monsters share more than the word's root with the verb "to demon­strate"; monsters signify. Butler's fiction is about resistance to the imperative to recreate the sacred image of the same (Butler 1978). Butler is like "Doris Lessing, Marge Piercy, Joanna Russ, Ursula LeGuin, Maragret Atwood, and Christa Wolf, [for whom] reinscribing the narrative of catastrophe engages them in the invention of an alternate fictional world in which the other (gender, race, species) is no longer subordinated to the same" (Brewer 1987: 46).

But unlike Lessing, Piercy, Russ, LeGuin, Atwood, Wolf, or Tiptree, Butler's uses of the conventions of science fiction to fashion speculative pasts and futures for the species seem deeply informed by Afro-American perspectives with strong tones of womanism or feminism. 8 Butler's gender, kind, and genre germinations and transgressions begin with two protean, parental figures: the body-changing Doro, originally from the ancient Kush people of East Africa, who, after being clothed in many bodies, belongs to no people, including humanity as a whole; and the Wild Seed woman, Anywanyu, taken by Doro to colonial New England from West Africa during the slave trade. The story begins not with the white girl child brought into Africa, but with the black woman taken out, who seeds the diaspora that stands as a figure of the history and possible future of a very polymorphous species (Butler 1977, 1980). This is survival fiction more than salvation history. Catastrophe, sur­vival, and metamorphosis are Butler's constant themes. From the perspective of an ontology based on mutation, metamorphosis, and diaspora, restoring an original sacred image can be a bad joke. Origins are precisely that to which Butler's people do not have access. But patterns are another matter.

At the end of Dawn, Butler has Lilith-whose name recalls her original unfaithful double, the repudiated wife of Adam-pregnant with the child of five progenitors, who come from two species, at least three genders, two sexes, and an indeterminate number of races. Adam's rib would be poor starting material to mold this new mother of humanity or her offspring. Preoccupied with marked bodies, Butler writes not of Cain or Ham, but of Lilith, the woman of color wrrose confrontations with the terms of selfhood, survival, and reproduction in the face of repeated ultimate catastrophe presage an ironic salvation history, with a salutary twist on the promise of a woman who will crush the head of the serpent. Butler's salvation history is Qot utopian, but remains deeply furrowed by the contradictions and questions of power within all communication. Butler's fiction is about miscegenation, 378

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not reproduction of the One. Butler's communities are assembled out of the geno­cides of history. not rooted in the fantasies of natural roots and recoverable origins. Hers is survival fiction. Most of the action of Daum takes place on the Oankali ship. itself a living part of their embodied culture of "exchange." The image of deracinated fragments of humanity packed into the body ofthe aliens' ship inescap­ably evokes the reader's memories of the terrible middle passage of the Atlantic slave trade that brought Lilith's ancestors to a "New World," where a "gene trade" was also enforced. Implicated in these histories. Butler's narrative has the possibil­ity-indeed. the necessity-of figuring something other than the Second Coming of the sacred image. Some other order of difference must be possible in Xenogenesis that could never be born in the Oedipal family narrative.

In the story, Lilith is a young American black woman rescued with a motley assortment of remnants of humanity from an earth in the grip of nuclear war. Like all the surviving humans, Lilith has lost everything. Her son and her second generation, Nigerian-American husband had died in an accident before the war. She had gone back to school, vaguely thinking she might become an anthropologist. But nuclear catastrophe, even more radically and comprehensively than the slave trade and history'S other great genocides, ripped all rational and natural connections with past and future from her and everyone else. Except for intermittent periods of questioning. the human remnant is kept in suspended animation for 250 years by the Oankali, the alien species that originally believed humanity was intent Of'l

committing suicide and so would be far too dangerous to try to save. Without human sensory organs, the Oankali are primatoid Medusa figures. their heads and bodies covered with multi-talented tentacles like a terran marine invertebrate's. These humanoid serpent people speak to the woman and urge her to touch them in an intimacy that would lead humanity to a monstrous metamorphosis. Multiply stripped, Lilith fights for survival, agency. and choice on the shifting boundaries that shape the possibility of meaning.

The Oankali do not rescue human beings only to return them unchanged to a restored earth. Their own origins lost to them through an infinitely long series of mergings and exchanges reaching deep into time and space, the Oankali are gene traders. Their essence is embodied commerce, conversation, communication-with a vengeance. Their nature is always to be midwife to themselves as other. Their bodies themselves are genetic technologies, driven to exchange. replication, danger­ous intimacy across the boundaries of self and other. and the power of images. Not unlike us. But unlike us, the hydra-headed Oankali do not build non-living technologies to mediate their self-formations and reformations. Rather. they are complexly webbed into a universe of living machines, all of which are partners in their apparatus of bodily production. including the ship on which the action of Dawn takes place. The resting humans sleep in tamed carnivorous plant-like pods. while the Oankali do what they can to heal the ruined earth. Much is lost forever. but the fragile layer of life able to sustain other life is restored. making earth ready for recolonization by large animals. The Oankali are intensely interested in humans as potential exchange partners partly because humans are built from such beautiful and dangerous genetic structures. The Oankali believe humans to be fatally. but reparably. flawed by their genetic nature as simultaneously intelligent and hierarchi­cal. Instead, the aliens live in the post modern geometries of vast webs and networks, in which the nodal points of individuals are still intensely important. These webs 379

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are hardly innocent of power and violence; hierarchy is not power's only shape­for aliens, primates, or humans.

The Oankali make "prints" of all their refugees, and they can print out replicas of the humans from these mental-organic-technical images. The replicas allow a great deal of gene trading. The Oankali are also fascinated with Lilith's "talent" for cancer, which killed several of her relatives, but which in Oankali "hands" would become a technology for regeneration and metamorphoses. But the Oankali want more from humanity; they want a full trade, which will require the intimacies of sexual mingling and embodied pregnancy in a shared colonial venture in, of all places, the Amazon valley. Human individuality will be challenged by more than the Oankali communication technology that translates other beings into themselves as signs, images, and memories. Pregnancy raises the tricky question of consent, property in the self, and the humans' love of themselves as the sacred image, -the sign of the same. The Oankali intend to return to earth as trading partners with humanity'S remnants. In difference is the irretrievable loss of the illusion of the one.

Lilith is chosen to train and lead the first party of awakened humans. She will be a kind of midwife/mother for these radically atomized peoples' emergence from their cocoons. Their task will be to form a community. But first Lilith is paired in an Oankali family with the just pre-metamorphic youngster, Nikanj, an ooloi. She is to learn from Nikanj, who alters her mind and body subtly so that she can live more freely among the Oankali; and she is to protect it during its metamorphosis, from which they both emerge deeply bonded to each other. Endowed with a second pair of arms, an adult ooloi is the third gender of the Oankali, a neuter being who uses its special appendages to mediate and engineer the gene trading of the species and of, each family. Each child among the Oankali has a male and female parent, usually sister and brother to each other, and an ooloi from another group, race, or moitie. One translation in Oankali languages for ooloi is "treasured strangers." The ooloi will be the mediators among the four other parents of the planned cross-species children. Heterosexuality remains unquestioned, if more complexly mediated. The different social subjects, the different genders that could emerge from another embodiment of resistance to compulsory heterosexual reproductive politics, do not inhabit this Daum. In this critical sense, Daum fails in its promise to tell another story, about another birth, a xenogenesis. Too much of the sacred image of the same is left intact.

Even so, the treasured strangers give intense pleasure across the boundaries of group, sex, gender, and species. It is a fatal pleasure that marks Lilith for the other awakened humans, even though she has not yet consented to a pregnancy. Faced with her bodily and mental alterations and her bonding with Nikanj, the other humans do not trust that she is still human, whether or not she bears a human-alien child. Neither does Lilith. Worrying that she is aJudas-goat, she undertakes to train the humans with the intention that they will survive and run as soon as they return to earth, keeping their humanity as people before them kept theirs. In the training period, each female human pairs with a male human, and then each pair, willing or not, is adopted by an adult ooloi. Lilith loses her Chinese-American lover, Joseph, who is murdered by the suspicious and enraged humans. At the end, the first group of humans, estranged from their ooloi and hoping to escape, leave for earth. Whether they can be fertile without their ooloi is doubtful. Perhaps it is not only 380

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the individual of a sexually reproducing species who always has more than one parent; the species too might require multiple mediation of its reproductive bio­politics. Lilith finds she must remain behind to train another group, her return to earth indefinitely deferred. Nikanj has made her pregnant by Joseph's sperm and the genes of its own mates. [Figure 16 .3) Lilith has not consented, and the first book of Xenogenesis leaves her with the ooloi's uncomprehending comfort that "the differences will be hidden until metamorphosis."Lilith remains unreconciled: "But they won't be human. That's what matters. You can't understand, but that is what matters." The treasured stranger responds, "The child inside you matters" (Butler 1987: 263). Butler does not resolve this dilemma.

In the narrative of Primate Visions, the terms for gestating the germ of future worlds constitute a defining dilemma of reproductive politics. The contending shapes of sameness and difference in any possible future are at stake in the primate

Figure 16.3 Jacket illustration for the second no\'e!, Adulthood Riles (1988) in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series. Copyright Wayne Barlowe. Published with permission. Mediat­ing the contact of egg and sperm, this medusoid, alien-human, poly-racial hybrid figure of uncertain gender represents one of Lilith's children born from her unfree "exchange" with the Oankali, the alien species introduced in the first book of the series, Dawn. Barlowe's polyvalent illustration contrasts sharply with that by another artist for the cover of Dawn, in which the Afro-American woman. Lilith , was pictured as an ivory white brunene mediat­ing the awakening of an ivory white blond woman aboard the Oankali ship. Illustrating the workings of the unmarked category, "white," Dawn's cover art has allowed several readers whom I know to read the book without noticing either the textual cues indicating that Lilith is black or the multi-racialism pervading Xenogenesis. 381

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order's unfinished narrative of traffic across the specific cultural and political bound­aries that separate and link animal, human. and machine in a contemporary global world where survival is at stake. Finally, this contested world is the primate field, where, with or without our consent, we are located. "She laughed bitterly. 'I suppose I could think of this as fieldwork-but how the hell do I get out of the field?' " 382

NOTES

The fifty or so field primatologists active by 1965 came from about IO nations. Those on fellowship at the Center were DeVore, K.RL. Hall. Phyllis Jay (who also had a role in the planning), Hiroki Mizuhara, Vernon Reynolds. and George Schaller. The stable study group also contain"d Hamburg, Washburn. and Frances Reynolds. During the project y"ar, a conference was held at th" Center. involving about 18 additional ?"ople. Also. Peter Marler, William Mason, Adriaan Kortlandt, and J.P. Scott came for short ?"riods. Washburn and Hamburg wrote the synthesizing ?"nultimate chapter on "Implications of Primate Research," in which the social group as the principal primate adaptation was the organizing concept. This pi"ce set the logic of future field studies. while Schaller wrote the concluding guide to field procedures. The recommended norm was to conduct a prelimi­nary ecological survey, to follow by a detailed, non-interventionist observation of the social life of a selected group; producing a "s?"cies repertoire" based on quantitative data, including a good population census; and then to conduct intensive studies into some particular aspect of behavior. using experimental as well as observational methods. United States scientists far outnumbered others. With some exceptions. the organizing idea of the project was the characterization of s?"cies­specific ways of social life in ecological context. Differences in social behavior within species in various habitats were accommodated by explanations like referring them to differential effeclS on a common behavioral plan of crowding and stress (DeVore 1965a; Jay 1965a).

2 In Primau Societies, fifteen chapters had only men authors; twelve had only women authors; thirteen were written jointly by both available genders. Six of the chapters were authored by married couples; one was jointly authored by women colleagues and five by men colleagues.

3 One former Washburn student from Chicago, Warren Kinzey. then at the City University of New York, was present at the Center in 1983-84; but neither Kinzey nor DeVore's students indicate 430 continuity with the 1960s and early 1970s Washburn-affiliated approaches. By contrast. two former students of Peter Marler at Berkeley in the 1960s in zoology, Thomas Struhsaker and John Eisen-berg, were important to the later project, with its strong emphasis on socioecology, behavioral ecology, and conservation. Several past or present Marler associates (six) from the Rockefeller University. induding two of the editors (Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth), were authors in the 1987 volume. At least six authors had histories at Gom~, and nine were linked through Cambridge University. Studies of New World primate s?"cies were much in evidence, in sharp contrast to the essays in Primate Behavior. A kind of symbolic paternal figure whose Cambridge students were really the center of the action in the 1982-83 year, Robert Hinde played a role in the volume similar to Washburn's in the 1965 book.

4 Genic selection plays little role; the individual organism remains the practical unit of selection throughout the books' many narratives.

5 For example, Mittermeier and Cheney (1987: 489) emphasize that the "lesser developed countries" already commit a greater percentage of their resource. to conservation than richer countries, which benefit most from those resources, in the short run, in strengthening their national scientific and medical establishments and advancing the professional careers of their citizens.

6 Surviving the holocaust means surviving not only the Oedipal narrative, but. ultimately, "the symbolic drive toward atomisation, a cultural Symbolic unconscious whose drives are harnessed in the service of conflict, inequality, alienation. and violence .... Moreover, the narrative of difference in feminist writing requires that we reflect on our [whose?] global self-destructive adherence to the Oedipal narrative of rivalry and conflict that not only denies woman a place in its economy but also,

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according to the same dictates, programs the Symbolic order's drive to extinction as well. Surviving fictions engages nothing less than our imaginative capacity of surviving the nuclear symbolic in its narrative dimensions." (Brewer 1987: 48,50)

Lurking just underneath the discussion of difference throughout this book has been feminist theory's relations to psychoanalytic theory, especially Lacanian versions. It is too late to force this potent monster up from the depths, breaking the surface tension of my discussions of difference, to join the monkeys and apes in the upper stories of the primate text. Let the beast continue to inhabit the fluid regions that threaten to flood the primal scenes where "almost minds" communicate,

7 Born 1915, died 1987, Dr. Alice Hastings Bradley Sheldon's generic literary personae were James Tiptree,Jr. (1973,1975, 1978a, 1978b, 1981, 1985) and Racoona Sheldon (1985). Alice-named by mother, father, husband, the publishing industry, and a scientific academic credential-wrote constantly about alien conversations. The revelation of Tiptree's ':true" gender, her identification as "Alice" in 1977 after the death of her mother, was said to have caused a crushing depression (W4!hington Post, 19 May 1987, AI, 14). Her literary disguise was uncovered by an investigative fan, Jeffrey D. Smith. Sheldon and her husband helped in the founding of the C.I.A. after World War II. She then did photo-intelligence work, compiling dossiers on people, until the mid-1960 •. When she left the C.I.A., she used its techniques to establish a whole new identity. "I was somebody else" (Aldiss 1986: 365--6). The persona of James Tiptree, Jr., was not her first exploration of the modes of construction and deconstruction of identities; "Alice" was truly a twentieth century Milton's daughter. Neither Tiptree nor Octavia Butler could ever start writing from the beginning.

8 For introductions to Butler, see Crossley (1988); Mixon (1979); Salvaggio (1986); Williams (1986); 431 Zaki (1988).

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Abouttheauthor ______________________________________ _ Noel Gough is a senior lecturer in the School of Admin­istration and Curriculum Studies at Deakin University, Rusden Campus, Victoria, Australia, where he teaches and conducts research in curriculum studies, environ­mental education and futures study. He has published widely in these fields and has also pursued these interests during visiting appointments at universities in Canada and the UK. Prior to becoming a teacher educator in 1972, he taught biology, science and media studies in Victorian secondary schools. He is the editor (Australasia) of the Journal of Curriculum Studies, convenor of the Futures Study Network of the Australian Curriculum Studies Association and director of the Deakin University Narrative Inquiry in Teacher Education project. These professional activities leave him far too little time for reading SF books, watching SF movies and listening to pop music.

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