So I was just listening to this amusing segment on NPR where they read some of the humorously literal answers to literal questions that Professor Paul Brian has on his webpage. Now the humor is reasonably funny but his motivation for posting them was apparently somewhat serious. Dr. Brian teaches a (fairly interesting looking) course on science fiction and apparently this page was intended as a chide to the sciencey students in his classes who couldn’t appreciate the human interest or metaphorical commentary of the works because they got the science wrong.

Of course not every scientifically incorrect plot point is a flaw, for instance the steam punk style science in His Dark Materials Trilogy is obviously a virtue and even the hardest¹ science fiction like “Timemaster” by Robert L. Forward usually ask us to assume possibly false facts about our universe. However, a great many science fiction works are written in a decidedly realist way and therefore suffer greatly if their major premises turn out to be implausible².

So if Dr. Brian’s complaint was really that some of his students thought some well regarded science fiction works were critically flawed because of their scientific inaccuracies I could disagree more. If the men in “All Quiet on the Western Front” had been shooting ray guns or Gatsby had flown a helicopter instead of a car no one would dispute that the unrealistic elements seriously detracted from the story. The fact that Dr. Brian and others in the literary establishment might not have the background to be viscerally disturbed by the scientific inaccuracies is no different from the fact that some people may be sufficiently ignorant of history that private helicopters in the 1920s³ wouldn’t bother them.

On the other hand if Dr. Brian is merely saying that people should be able to appreciate the virtues of a work despite its serious flaws then I agree. Even if the flaws in a book ruin it for you it doesn’t mean you can’t acknowledge what it does well and understand the value it might have to others. However, I think this is a lesson that the literary and humanities crowd needs to learn more than anyone else. For instance science fiction writer Greg Egan might not have particularly complex characters or a great deal of psychological development in his books but he is far and away my favorite author because unlike every other author he actually presents philosophical and imaginative ideas that are worth thinking about⁴. Or consider international thriller type books whose characters and storyline may be generic spy novel but whose detailed background educates about current events and the way international diplomacy works. Or even mystery novels that may do nothing exceptional with their characters or psychology but masterfully lay out the clues and give the reader an intense mental workout.

So if Dr. Brian is serious about wanting people to acknowledge the value of books whose flaws we find too annoying to read he should start with the literary establishment (and for all I know he does). More than anyone else it is they who are unwilling to acknowledge that equally reasonable sensibilities may make a science fiction story without complex character drama better than Shakespeare or that the intellectual workout from an otherwise generic mystery novel is no worse (per unit time) than that of reading Ulysses. After all if it’s perfectly okay for them to overlook absurd scientific claims that viscerally ruin the realism for some of us why is it any worse to overlook characteristics that people with degrees in literature tend to find annoying?