2026-04-22
The "s" in sci-fi stands for sexist.
I don't know what the rest of the letters stand for but that's what the s is. It's a common theme in sci-fi to hypothesize what "alien science" might be like (see, Roache World, ...). Just recently, Hail Mary had its big moment with the Gosling movie coming out and everyone deciding that NASA was cool again. The reason I enjoyed Hail Mary the first time I read it was not because of Grace's pithy (stupid) humor, but because I got to imagine what to do when communicating with a different intelligence. Humans get to figure out how to communicate with an alien by using math and science, the universal expressions supersetting language, prime numbers follow. But we don't know, we don't really know that a different form of intelligence would comprehend, or be able to communicate with physical properties in the way that we do. Imagine an intelligence that was specifically good at comprehending things in 4 dimensions, where we have a really hard time doing math. What would the scientific method mean to something thinking in parallel processes? And what of our understanding of math and science has been limited by our own brain function? This is something for another post, as the real question I want to ask is; Does it matter that there's no chicks in Sci-Fi? The answer is obviously yes, if only for the inspiration of future generations of scientists. Aside from the general injustices and waste of perfectly good brains, questions persist. Is the Female experience so "alien" to the Male as to cause a gap in our conceptions of science? Led to society's desire for deterministic models of the world? I tentatively answer yes ... Not because of genetics, or physical ability, because of culture. Look at the evolution of "Scientific Culture", knowledge first came from wise men and religious leaders, then philosophers and inventors, all before empiricism was adopted. For a while philosophers were blurring into scientists, now we are becoming closer and closer to technicians. Each moment has had its own culture, directly impacting the problems they chose to think about, the manner in which they pursued them, and the breadth (or narrowness) of their expertise. Arguably the greatest geniuses in history came out of a culture much more topically broad than our modern one. But then, and even now, sci-fi and science culture is still very "male". Limiting our perspective, how can science have a perspective on the universe if it doesn't have the perspective of humans? All of this to say the following: Neil Stephenson is the Greatest Sci-Fi Author in History.