Imperial Stars 2-Republic and Empire by Jerry Pournelle

Author:Jerry Pournelle
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 1987-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

However, science fiction can't "prove" anything about the universe. We can speculate about it, we can try to expand people's horizons and stretch their imaginations; but we cannot, as science fiction writers, add to scientific knowledge, and this goes for "insights into the human condition" every whit as much as for contributions to nuclear physics.

Science fiction can't prove anything, because science fiction makes up its data. You can prove anything if you can make up your data.

Example: An earlier paper given at this very panel (at the Contact! symposium) uses the speech by the Army major in the film Close Encounters as an example of how the military thinks. This is patently absurd; it is at best evidence of Steve Spielberg's theory of how the military thinks, and it's probably not even useful for inferring that. Once again we have confusion of data, evidence, and plausibility.

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