SciFi elements in "Gravity's Rainbow"?

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

On 21.08.2011 18:27, Dave Monroe wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 21, 2011 at 10:53 AM,<kelber at mindspring.com>  wrote:
>
>> Are alternate history stories necessarily science fiction?  Certainly, they're speculative fiction, but shouldn't there be something science-y in a sci-fi book?  Ditto for time travel.  By Robinson's definition, Slaughterhouse Five and Time and Again(Jack Finney) are science fiction.  I guess I've automatically considered The Man in the High Castle to be sci-fi, simply because it's written by PKD, but there's nothing particularly science-y about it.
> ... this is a valid, even a good, question, though do noite that,
> generally, time travel stories do in deed generally deploy some sort
> of fictional(ized? can there be "fictional" science is another valid,
> perhaps even good, question) science (e.g., The Time Machine), but not
> always (does A Connecticut Yake in King Arthur's Court count?  but,
> again, Time and Again)..  Atternate histories often (e.g., The Guns of
> the South) do so as well, but not always (e.g., Bring the Jubllee) do
> so as well (The Difference Engine as an example of an alternate
> history via an alternate/fictional science?).
>
> Does history (or, perhaps, more properly, historiography?) count as (a) science?
>
> ... this may the point @ which "speculative fiction" becomes the
> preferable term (though ithe is to beg the question, what precisely
> separate "speculative" from ":fiction"?) ...
>

Guess the distinction could be:

Speculative Fiction vs. Social Realism (example: "Post Office" by 
Charles Bukowski).

And while counterfactual history was among historians still pretty much 
a no-no 20 years ago ("Oh, I see, we have someone from the Social 
Science camp ... OK, let's talk about the 'what if?' stuff for a minute 
or two and then return to work"), it's by now if not a legitimate then 
at least a much debated new approach. Of course counterfactual history 
is not the same as alternate history novels - historians, following von 
Ranke, will always be primarily concerned about 'how it actually was' - 
but the difference between science and art is here not as substantial as 
in other cases. Considering the proto-scientific content of alternate 
history novels, one may also think of certain aspects of sociology. In 
an introductory lecture Adorno once said that a good sociologist needs, 
along with the "evil eye", something he called "exact fantasy". Sounds 
contradictory and merely philosophical? Well, not quite. In context of 
qualitative social research teachable methods for this were developed. 
For example, in qualitative content-analysis (the opposite is 
quantitative content-analysis where you, for instance, check out how 
often certain words, formulation etc do appear in a text) you can make 
experiments with texts, films, interaction protocols etc to find out 
about the deeper layers of meaning  (see Gerhard Kleining: Das 
qualitative Experiment, KZfSS 38, pp. 724-750). You can take away or add 
something and see how the meaning of the material changes. Once you're 
trained in this, it's easy. If you think now that this is 
pseudo-scientific nonsense --- you can do so without insulting me, I'm 
out of business and 'transscientific' by now --- you should at least 
note that the police hires social scientists who are able to do 
qualitative analysis when it comes to the decoding of anonymous letters 
in the case of abductions, extortions and other crimes. As already said, 
you can also apply this method  to film and other configurations of 
meaning.  So why not apply it to the sequel of historical events? This 
is, imo, exactly the quasi-scientific approach of alternate history 
novels! And Philip K. Dick, before writing "The Man in the High Castle", 
studied not only the books on Nazi Germany available at the time but 
also material from the archives of the University of California, 
Berkeley, which he, having learned the language, could read in original. 
"It felt odd to be imagining not a hypothetical future but a 
hypothetical past. The more he thought about it, this past and the 
present that ensued from it seemed to take on substance: things actually 
could have happened this way" (Carrère: I'm Alive And You Are Dead, p. 
62). Yes, they could, and thanks to the novel we understand this much 
better. You may, if you wanna avoid the word 'science', call it creative 
exploration of the human condition!

Coming to think about PKD and 'hard science', he's not so bad at this as 
the label 'Soft SciFi' does suggest. In all the non-mainstream texts I 
know so far, there's technology in the fields of air engineering and 
information technology not available at the time. He might not be as 
interested in this  as some Old School SciFi writers, but then again he 
--- "1995: Computer use by ordinary citizens (already available in 1980) 
will transform the public from passive viewers of TV into mentally 
alert, highly trained, information-processing experts" (PKD: 
Predictions) --- was quite right about certain aspect of nowadays 
computer culture. He also was, and not only as a user but also as a 
writer, pretty interested in psychopharmacology (definitely rather hard 
science than soft science). All those imaginary drugs like, for example, 
"Can-D" (read: Candy) and "Chew-Z" (read: Chew that!) from "The Three 
Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", or "JJ-180" from "Now Wait For Last Year", 
or "Substance D" from "A Scanner Darkly". All this, too, is speculation 
on the basis of technological progress (here the emergence of 
Lysergsäurediathylamid-25 and other new substances, used - MK Ultra! - 
not only for private purposes). Speaking of "A Scanner Darkly", I'd like 
to hint at the fact that Dick makes use of results from brain-research 
(and again: this is hard science!), especially the by then new 
recognition of the two halves of the brain. So, perhaps one can say that 
PKD was not so terribly interested in the mechanical details of 
space-ships, but not that he lost interest in hard science along the 
way. Now you may ask: But how about the VALIS-trilogy? Well, in the 
study by K.S. Robinson already mentioned here, Robinson reports that 
Frederic Jameson, in a talk from June 1982, uttered the assumption that 
PKD grew tired of the fictional future-drugs-scenarios he had made use 
of so often and, thus, intensified the artistic transformation of 
theological (and also gnostic) models that took place in his work at 
least since "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", in order to ask his 
basic question about the nature of reality on a new ground. The 
brilliance of the trilogy shows that this was a good choice. And when 
you take a look at the "Exegesis", you'll see that he did not drop his 
interest in brain-research, psychopharmacology, psychology and other 
sciences. Philip K. Dick always was aware that the events of 
February/March 1974 might have been an illusion. Without this doubt he 
couldn't have written "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer" which, in 
its soberness, was the ideal completion of his oeuvre.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9UCsnxCwbM


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