The gulf between the two cultures, art and science, is as immense as ever. On the whole, modern writers who consider themselves “proper” writers don’t engage with modern technology and science. The thinking goes that the sort of people who would read a book about technology would probably opt for the Book of the Car.
There are, of course, exceptions — the entire genre of science-fiction for one thing. But so-called “real writers” often simply avoid the subject.
This indifference is partly because they are not interested — art looks down on science and vice versa — but also because they are uneasy with the demands that technology and science make on them. But more profoundly, most novelists think of science and technology as irrelevant to their central subject: Human nature.
The recent attempts that have been made to bring technology into fiction for instance — Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, PJ Tracy’s Want to Play?, Thinks... by David Lodge, e by Matt Beaumont and Transmission by Hari Kunzru — have been patchily successful, and have concentrated largely on the narrative potential of internet chatrooms, e-mail and computer commerce, for instance. Anything that is deemed to have a “cutting edge” is a lever with which publishers can sell their products to book chains.
But there is something cursory about these attempts. With my new novel, The Seymour Tapes, I spent only a small amount of time researching surveillance systems, because surveillance per se does not interest me. What does interest me is the effect it has on the human mind. My protagonist, Alex Seymour, suffering a midlife crisis, installs video cameras in his house to secretly tape his own family. For me, it is when it is tied in to its effect on the human spirit that technology comes alive.
The same is true of science. I am specifically interested in physics and cosmology, to the extent that I hope to write my next book about the search for dark matter. But why am I interested? Not because equations or machines interest me, but because at the current frontiers of modern physics there are remarkable discoveries taking place, changing our view of what a human being is and how we are placed in the universe.
Of course, there are “proper” writers who have engaged with technology, physics and cosmology, to a certain extent: JG Ballard, Jeanette Winterson, Ian McEwan and Nicholas Mosley. Martin Amis has long had a fascination with entropy, space and time, which creeps into his writing — I always remember his observation that everything around us, including ourselves, “was forged in the stars. We are literally made of stardust.” But by and large, novelists, when they have addressed science and technology, have been obscure and overly intellectual about the subject, as if disguising their own ignorance about the strangeness of the universe. Or perhaps their own knowledge. It is as if physics, which is so manifestly weird, is faintly embarrassing — almost like it was fiction itself, rather than one of the deepest forms of truth.
Thus any real writer who engages with concepts of physics and technology is often written off as a writer of science fiction.
This, to some extent, was the fate of Kurt Vonnegut, who although a genius, hardly gets put on the same plane as his peers, Updike, Roth and Bellow. Other than Vonnegut, the first literary science novel I ever read — wonderful because it was about how human beings fitted into the scientific universe — was Amanda and the Eleven Million Mile High Dancer (1985) by Carol Hill, which, despite a certain cult status, is more or less forgotten. 20 years later, Philip Pullman still can be written off by some as a fantasy or children’s writer, so his remarkable passages about the intelligence of dark matter in The Subtle Knife have gone pretty much unremarked on. But there is hope. The new novel by Alison McLeod, The Wave Theory of Angels — set partially in the Fermilab, the Chicago physics lab — has a wonderful first paragraph: “The world yearns. This is its sure gravity: The attraction of bodies. Earth for molten star. Moon for Earth. A hand for the orb of a breast.”
My journey from fiction into science has just begun, and for the first time for several years, I feel genuinely excited by a subject. Because science is at the heart of life, that is to say, who we are, and as such any novelist who ignores it is turning their back on one of the most profound ways of seeing that we possess.
