Contenu du sommaire : Science et science-fiction

After presenting the mainstream perspectives of sociologists of literature towards science fiction, the article aims at developing an original approach that could account for the specificity of science fiction, i.e. seeing it as being positioned at the very boundaries of science and literature, reality and fiction, and technique and culture. Rather than confining science fiction into either poles of those dichotomies, this approach wants to invite sociology to fully embrace the « space between » that characterizes it. It also entails that science fiction may become one of the privileged loci from where the scholars can observe how the split between the categories mentioned above is being constituted, displaced, renewed or, conversely, consolidated and reinforced.

Science fiction has close ties with science, as we know, but this article focuses more specifically on the words of science, the scientific vocabulary, which we often find in science fiction texts and, in particular, on the enlightening way in which science fiction authors depict, in their narratives, either discourse about science or the discourse of scientists about science. Essentially, the vocabulary of science helps authors to build fictional worlds, and, in return science fiction narratives echo the cultural representations of science, in different contexts and periods. By so doing they contribute at times to question the scientific approach itself, while at the same time stimulating readers' curiosity about science, including the youngest readers.

The “colonization” of the planet Mars is a theme that haunts those who are passionate about space. It finds its relevance in science fiction and futurology narratives, which function as signs of reference and appartenance within the space community. This article explores how and why these narratives are mobilised, as well as the imaginations and conceptions of the sciences and technologies they help to communicate. In addition to this analysis based on a corpus of writings, we will illustrate this cultivation of the idea of the colonization of Mars using the history of the Mars Society as a starting point. The collective belief in the relocation of the human life on Mars is reinforced among “enthusiasts” by the fact that it is constantly being deceived by the delays in the launching of the missions that are supposed to accomplish this project.

Most work on the relationship between science and science fiction focuses on how science fiction can advance science by speculatively elaborating scientific theories. This text, to the contrary, argues that we should understand some science fiction texts as contributing to the making of science as a social practice rather differently: namely by seeing them as a form of didactic literature which offers moral exempla to scientists or potential scientist readers. In order to illustrate this point, this article considers the representation of scientist-heroes in Gregory Benford's Cosm and Ursula K. Le Guin The Dispossessed. It illustrates the ways which these authors depict model scientists that can help readers to imagine what it might mean to be a scientist, and to engage in science as a profession. It brings out the ways in which their drive to create such didactic examples may have emerged out of a crisis within the ideology of science itself, namely the crisis of legitimacy and authority of science today known as the Science Wars.

Beginning with the famous scene in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869–71) in which a giant squid appears facing the large window of the Nautilus, just as the heroes were discussing its possible existence, this article is an attempt to question a contradiction in the discourse on the images in science. The popular novel and the scientific vulgarisation are constantly constructing images of scientists who are looking directly at reality, like the heroes in Jules Verne, images which illustrate a two-fold discourse on the sciences and on popular culture. Whereas the scientists are looking directly at nature precisely because they are capable of going beyond the ‘shadows in the cave' and the influence of images, those who are not scientists would take a great risk if they were to do the same precisely because they may well be influenced by these popular novel images and might imagine all sorts of things which do not exist. This article attempts to demonstrate that these images gain by being analysed in other terms while at the same time bearing in mind that it is precisely a question of images and by constructing a symmetrical analysis which deals with the scientific images and these “popular” images in the same terms. This enables us to move away from the opposition between scientific thought and popular beliefs to describe how the images display both scientific knowledge and public discourse on the sciences.

This paper investigates scientists' conceptual borrowings from science fiction through the case of Philip K. Dick's The Minority Report. In this short story, K. Dick depicts New York City as a crime-free society, thanks to the work of a police division, Precrime, whose function is to arrest criminals-to-be before they actually commit any crime. This writing has spurred academics' attention, including criminologists and neuroscientists. While some of them propose a utopian reading of K. Dick's ideas, other accentuate its dystopian dimension, depending on whether they are proponents or critics of the use of predictive methods in the criminal justice system. Moreover, we show that while critics tend to inscribe The Minority Report into a regime of truth that tells something about the current state of our societies, proponents tend to elaborate futuristic visions that come to complement and extend Philip K. Dick's.

Ringworld (1970), the most famous novel of the American writer, Larry Niven, is the first novel to have been explicitly sold and presented as a novel of “hard science fiction” (although the sub-type existed well before its publication). By proposing both an analysis of the text and its reception by critics and readers, this article reflects the fact that science fiction, far from being a creation of the imagination with no foundation, does in fact obey imperatives of realism and even of scientific credibility. In this instance, by writing a novel of the sort, Larry Niven has not only taken a stance in the field of American science fiction; he has also participated indirectly in a scientific dialogue—by means of the text—with the mathematician and physicist, Freeman J. Dyson, while at the same time suggesting a variant of the concept of “artificial biosphere” which the latter had developed in an earlier academic article.

In public discussions or in private conversations, one frequently hears the idea expressed that “God is beyond dogmas and religion.” Those who say this imagine that a “God beyond language” would promote inter-religious dialogue, because going beyond statements of beliefs would enable differences to be overcome and religious conflicts to be eliminated by a process of spiritual convergence around a link shared by all religions. Now this is not the case. We observe that the potential for violence inherent to expressions of religion has not been neutralised by the idea of a God beyond language and the dialogue between religions seems to be awaiting a lasting settlement. There must therefore be something wrong with the idea that God is beyond language. This article proposes to investigate this inaccuracy by making a detour via Ian Watson's science fiction novel, The Embedding, which we use here as a support for an epistemological reflection to reveal the impasse of the shared link and the scepticism to which it leads. Finally, to the question of knowing what to think of the idea of a God beyond language, we could reply, in the wake of The Embedding: this is an idea from science fiction.