Radiance

[Richard Romeo]

Thanks to the folks on the Gaddis-list, I'm enjoying Scholz's novel 
Radiance, about nuclear weapons research lab.  Below is a interesting essay 
by Scholz on science fiction. Unlike much of today's sci-fi, Scholz's 
concerns are the immediate concerns of today.  enjoy

Rich


Night Visible
by Carter Scholz


Long ago and far away -- I mean before Lucasfilm -- "science fiction" -- or 
at least one clique within that fractious literary conversation -- had the 
temerity to call itself "speculative fiction." That speculum wasn't meant to 
be Stendhal's mirror of the world, but for a while I saw it that way. As a 
young reader in the 1960s, I was less interested in other worlds than in 
some accounting of the one I lived in, how it got that way, and what it 
might become in my adulthood...say, around 2001.

The dominant naturalist mode of U.S. fiction didn't have much to say about 
that. It was missing a huge part of the picture, and that part was science 
and technology. A few writers of "serious" lit were all along making odd 
moves counter to the naturalist hegemony, in content or in narrative mode, 
but by and large it was the SF genre, faintly disreputable and with nothing 
to lose, that had the monopoly on glimpses into the secret history of the 
world then coming into visibility. All those distant worlds and futures were 
really just the present moment viewed through night-vision goggles.


Now, with a computer on every affluent desktop, technological saturation is 
a commonplace and science is the property of all writers. In the 1960s John 
Updike and Philip K. Dick were incommensurable. Now there's virtually no 
divide between Harry Mulisch's The Procedure and J.G. Ballard's 
Super-Cannes, both set in a present that, not long ago, would have looked 
like SF. The engines of the night are fully visible.


My novel Radiance is a look at such a present, in which social history has 
been superseded by something else. At the inception of this present, on the 
mesa of Los Alamos in the 1940s, there was a social order; the Manhattan 
Project could not have functioned without it, without the extraordinary 
charm and grace of Oppenheimer, without the shared background of the 
scientists. Physics was then a very small world, like a small town. It was a 
community that brought into being that which abolished community. I mean 
more than just the atomic bomb, which exposed like an X-ray an entrenched 
reality -- the absolute and indispensable centrality of science and 
technology in the political and economic world.


What's new? States have always funded technology for military use. But after 
the bomb, state-sponsored technology changed from an option to an urgency. 
Immense amounts of money and talent had to be poured into it; therefore, 
fortunes of power and of money would be made at it.


This new world, which was more or less invented in elite laboratories and 
think tanks, became quickly and inevitably a global reality. Quickly, 
because of that sense of urgency, and the money. Inevitably, because of the 
secrecy imposed by the elites, and the disinterest or disenfranchisement of 
the governed. (According to Richard Rhodes in Dark Sun, by 1994 the U.S. had 
spent about four trillion dollars on nuclear weapons and their delivery 
systems. Atomic Audit, edited by Stephen I. Schwartz, puts the figure at 
$5.5 trillion.)


This technological reordering disrupted and dismantled older ways of life in 
every part of the globe, by threatening to project this unexampled force, by 
the proliferation of weapons, and by the consumer technologies and markets 
spun off from such unprecedented spending. From aircraft to personal 
computers to the software that runs on them, virtually every high tech 
industry owes its fortune to this massive peacetime commitment, made by the 
USA and matched by the USSR, to military R&D.


Philip Quine, the hapless U.S. government scientist at the center of 
Radiance, is a pure product and example of this disruption. Although he is 
at the heart of this new order, he is a displaced person, a man without 
history. He has no particular past, he commits to no future, he barely has a 
present that isn't determined by acceleration, uncertainty, crisis, and 
damage control. Instead of a history, he has technical documents, goals and 
guidelines, legacy code, off-the-shelf hardware. His science is one of 
instrumentalism and use-value rather than of truth-value. As such, it needs 
to be sold like any other product in the marketplace. And here, it seems to 
me, is the USA's unique contribution to the history of military R&D, and 
fertile ground for a novelist: the conjoining of marketing and technology, 
which reached an apotheosis in Ronald Reagan's 1983 hawking of SDI, a 
technology so speculative that his closest advisors hadn't heard of it. Even 
SDI's proponents asserted, years later in the rubble of failed claims and 
broken promises, that the strategy all along had been to bankrupt the Soviet 
Union, not to shoot down its missiles.


And so it still goes, long after the Soviet demise, through rounds of new 
enemies and justifications and marketing strategies. Science fiction has 
ceased to be a revelatory literary genre, and is now writ directly upon the 
world in white papers, funding legislation, cost overruns, boom-and-bust 
IPOs, environmental impact reports, foreign policy. The legacy of debt, 
toxicity, and blowback we have only begun to reckon.



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