Sf covers every kind of scientific advance, not just spaceships, aircars or superior weapons. James Blish's They Shall Have Stars goes into technical details about the discovery of anti-gravity and of antiagathic drugs. In Intervention:
"One of my nephew's underhanded acquisitions was a small genetic-engineering firm in Burlington, Vermont. This outfit had perfected and patented a bacterial organism called a lignin degrader, that broke down (i.e., 'ate') a common waste product of the pulpwood industry, converting it into a host of valuable chemicals that had heretofore been obtained from increasingly scarce petroleum." (p. 507)
Technology involves economics which involves business (and other) arrangements between human beings. Thus, the narrator's nephew, needing additional capitalization, approaches an even bigger crook to proposed a merger sealed by two Mafia-style arranged marriages.
An sf novelist combines scientific speculations with character interactions.
Kaor, Paul!
ReplyDeleteI still remember that criminal nephew of Uncle Rogi! And how the "bigger crook" was amused by the deal proposed to him, because it was so SICILIAN.
Sean
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