Foreword, forward

Here is where we might first begin. It is 1959, in post-war Britain, at the Senate House in Cambridge, where Charles Percy Snow stands and delivers the annual Rede lecture. He is a novelist, a research scientist, and, during the war years, a civil servant who recruited scientific talent to support the effort. He is not the first to tackle the question of the distinctness and separation of the scientific world as a culture–the Romantics had already begun this discussion–but he is a contemporary figure with sufficient influence and authority. His ideas are, perhaps, reactionary, but he is a man of letters and numbers, and so he commands attention. He has been thinking about this for three years, after thirty years of work, and now he has his audience.

As he lectures, Snow lays out his premise. In intellectual life, there are two distinct groups–what he will come to call cultures–that exist: that of the scientific-minded, and the literary. The literary, in Snow’s talk, speaks to the “everything else” that isn’t, strictly speaking, scientific, so more broadly, he applies a broad-strokes definition to the productive outputs of the humanities, social sciences, and arts. Science is not just a discipline but a culture, with shared attitudes, standards, patterns of behaviour, approaches and assumptions to the world. So, too, “the literary” group–the non-scientists–have their own culture, and it is equally robust. The problem, Snow declares, is that the space between these cultures is widening, and the farther apart the cultures grow, the more the misunderstanding between them grows, too.

Snow’s dismay is largely focused on the separation between scientists and “non-scientists” because he observes this growing gap and the inability of science to communicate and mingle with the literary, the social, and living world not steeped in scientific life: an intellectual culture, he says, hard-pressed to describe the second law of thermodynamics, despite scientists having a working knowledge of the products of the literary culture (Dickens, in his estimation, and Shakespeare). He is concerned that the widening gap will make it more and more difficult to understand the pace and scope of scientific discovery, and, by extension, to fully appreciate or comprehend how applied science impacts life (30-31). “Why aren’t we coping with the scientific revolution?” he asks. “How are we going to meet our future, both our cultural and practical future?” (33)

It is the eerie peal of a bell that is still ringing.

In 1959, the pace of innovation and scientific knowledge is beginning to pick up. If Snow is worried then, he would be beside himself now. Very few non-scientists “really understand the scientific concept of acceleration,” he says, or that the rate of change has increased so dramatically that there is “bound to be more social change,” (42-43) and that change will be compounded in the decades to come.

Throughout, Snow is advocating for a strengthening of scientific education and literacy in primary, secondary, and tertiary education, and, by extension, better awareness of the basic principles of fundamental science in order for the public to appreciate and respond to the impacts of innovation and applied science. He is alarmed, for, he says, if the scientific and literary cultures grow too far apart, “then no society is going to be able to think with wisdom” (50). The literary world–the cultural home of the majority of the intellectual–needs to be brought into closer contact and communion with the scientific. By 1964, Snow issues a follow-up to his lecture, offering more context and explanation:

It is dangerous to have two cultures which can’t or don’t communicate. In a time when science i determining much of our destiny, that is, whether we live or die, it is dangerous in the most practical terms. Scientists can give bad advice and decision-makers can’t know whether it is good or bad. On the other hand, scientists in a divided culture provide a knowledge of some potentialities which are theirs alone. All this makes the political process more complex, and in some ways more dangerous, than we should be prepared to tolerate for long, either for the purposes of avoiding disasters, or for fulfilling–what is waiting as a challenge to our conscience and goodwill–a definable social hope (98).

Snow’s views were likely shaped by his training as a scientist; it follows that he was encouraging the “literary” culture to engage in a better understanding of fundamental and applied science. But what is striking is his positioning of the two as distinct cultures–that they are entities unto themselves. Science, or the scientific, is a small but powerful body among many other bodies of culture, including the literary. Today, we might call it contemporary humanities and social sciences: the spaces of literature, sociology, history, economics, art, drama, psychology, and so on.

***

Here is another place where we might begin. It is 2022, and we are in front of screens–all of us spread out across Canada and around the globe, listening to Shoshanah Jacobs, a professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Guelph. We are engineers, sociologists, literary scholars, environmental scientists, psychologists, dramaturgs, veterinarians, biologists, ecologists, and graduate students, and we are talking about the future. Shoshanah is outlining a plan to gather us together into an transdisciplinary team as we prepare to apply for the Canadian federal government’s New Frontiers in Research funding program. The funding is designed to support high-risk, high-reward research with a special emphasis on knowledge mobilization, and we are thinking about a way to explore how science and innovation might be one day used to augment and support strained ecosystems services.

The concept of “manufactured” ecosystems sounds like science fiction, but it’s already arrived. When a city planner works to design a small riparian space in a downtown area–a created wetland–to slow and filter runoff from downpours, it is a manufactured ecosystem service. So, too, are the small mitigations and adaptations being deployed across landscapes: solar panels in agricultural fields that provide shade to livestock even as they generate electricity, biodigesters employed to break down agricultural waste through the work of anaerobic bacteria, and so on. We wanted to keep exploring the concept of manufactured ecosystems, using a speculative gaze that looked towards the future: to the pollinator drones, rhizome communication networks, and photosynthesizing air filtration.

Science fiction often takes the view that technology replaces what is lost, or what has never been. Ecological mysticism of the 1950s–C. P. Snow’s time–explored utopian paradises, where ecosystems were flattened into landscapes that were intelligently or divinely designed (Stableford 132). Those pastoral, utopian landscapes gradually became more domesticated, and then more hostile, and in a reflection of the growing impacts of climate change, increasingly more catastrophized. Contemporary science fiction stories that explore the collapse of ecosystems may lean towards their total devastation or their complete replacement.

Shoshanah encouraged us to think beyond that. What if, they said, biomimicry could be a source of inspiration for technologies designed to support struggling ecosystems services? What if the essential, life-sustaining functions of ecosystems–clean air, sources of nutrition, provision of water, places of recreation and spiritual connection–could be bolstered by human creations? What would that look like? How could it happen? And how could a transdisciplinary team embark on an exploration of it? And what if science and engineering actually worked alongside humanities and social science disciplines from the beginning, to interweave ways of exploring, questioning, and knowing?

***

Here is where we might begin, if we are telling this story to the future. And we are telling the story to a future: to an imagined reader, who may just be days ahead of us, but who might also be years–decades, grandmothers ahead of us. We would tell you that we kept asking the questions that Shoshanah gave us, and that we looked back at the stories people before us told, about why science and the arts could–should–come together to do the work of research and creation. That teams of us worked on new research tools, developed classifications and databases. Others of us assembled groups of writers and artists to work alongside the scientists and the engineers to identify ecosystems services that we could imagine new, biomimetic technologies for. That we ran workshops and experiments, discussions and messages, as a busy, purposeful hive of people asking, bringing, and sharing knowledge.

This anthology of science fiction is part of that. We brought together writers and asked them to speculate forward, ahead, and to tell us the stories of what that looked like. We have come closer together to explore how science and the arts can support each other, and we have collected these stories for you to read. We don’t know where you are, or who you are, but we fiercely hope that you are in better times, or, at least, that you continue to imagine and hope for a climate-secure future like we do. We hope that you can see that science and art are not separate, but part of a larger system of how we understand our world, and how we speculate its continuity.

We hope that we can speak to you through these stories.

References

Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures. Cambridge University Press, 1964.

Stableford, Brian. “Science Fiction and Ecology.” Edited by David Seed. A Companion to Science Fiction, Blackwell, 2008, pp. 127-141.