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Katherine MacLean
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 Katherine MacLean represents the leading edge of those sf writers who have applied the
methodologies and principles of the hard sciences to "soft sciences" such as anthropology, psychology, and sociology, to
make them predictive, to find their laws, to make them solve problems. This was generally done with a
condescending affect in the Campbell era and yet produced a stream of sf that grew into serious treatment of those
sciences, in the works of Chad Oliver in the 1950s, and flourished in the works of Ursula K. Le Guin and
Michael Bishop in recent decades. MacLean's collection,
The Diploids (1962), contains many of the best of her
early stories. Kingsley Amis called her "an excellent woman writer" and singled out two of her stories for extended
discussion in New Maps of Hell. She published little in the 1960s, returning at the end of the decade
with award-winning stories and a novel about psi powers,
The Missing Man (1975).
"The Snowball Effect" is one of her famous (and typical) pieces. A sociologist is challenged to make
his science do something real and so he does. It is a satire on social engineering that has the humorous attitude of
real scientists doing a postmortem on an insufficiently rigorously imagined, and comically failed, experiment.
Behind it is the moral position shared between writer and audience that doing science can be dangerous
and should be left to real scientists, not amateurs. It inhabits the same part of the genre as John Sladek's
"Stop Evolution in Its Tracks" and James P. Hogan's "Making Light": although the tone is different, the
underlying attitudes about science are the same. It also coexists recognizably alongside the mainstream of hard sf
stories from Heinlein and Asimov to Bob Shaw's "Light of Other Days": one big idea that changes the world is
examined from the point of view of the hard sf attitude.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
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Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
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Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.