DISCOVERY AND INVENTION

   These two topics are dealt with together because it is difficult to separate them, the discovery of a new principle usually being followed by the invention of a means of exploiting it. The discovery of new places is dealt with in COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS and LOST WORLDS. Invention, too, is discussed in other entries, including IMAGINARY SCIENCE, MACHINES, POWER SOURCES, PREDICTION, TECHNOLOGY and TRANSPORTATION.The invention story was prominent in 19th-century sf, notably in the works of Jules VERNE, who could almost be said to have invented it. Vernean inventions, particularly of new kinds of transport, were a feature of DIME-NOVEL SF. Yankee knowhow and inventiveness were carried into the past with Mark TWAIN's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). (A modern version of Twain's story, with a more sophisticated view of HISTORY, is LEST DARKNESS FALL [1941] by L. Sprague DE CAMP.) Edward Everett HALE invented orbital satellites in "The Brick Moon" (1869). Later in the century the US inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) became a hero figure; his exploits were much imitated in sf, and his name often borrowed (EDISONADE); some of these stories are also described under SCIENTISTS. Rudyard KIPLING invented the transatlantic airmail postal service in "With the Night Mail" (1905). H.G. WELLS invented a huge number of devices - some fantastic, as in THE TIME MACHINE (1895), and some realistic, as with the tanks in "The Land Ironclads" (1903) and atomic war in The World Set Free (1914). Samuel CHAPMAN's Doctor Jones' Picnic (1898) features a busy inventor who creates a huge aluminium BALLOON and a homoeopathic cure for cancer. The index of Everett F. BLEILER's Science-Fiction: The Early Years (1990) lists 134 stories and novels according to their particular inventions, those for "g" being "gasoline substitute, ghost condensor, gravity storage apparatus, gunpowder engine"; other letters of the alphabet produce examples just as eccentric.The invention story had an especially strong vogue in the early PULP MAGAZINES, where it was equalled in popularity as an sf subject only by the future- WAR story and the lost-race story. Examples are: George Allan ENGLAND's The Golden Blight (1912 Cavalier; 1916), in which a gold-disintegrator effects economic revolution; William Wallace COOK's The Eighth Wonder (1906-7 Argosy; 1925), in which an eccentric inventor threatens to steal the world's electricity supply with a huge electromagnet; and Garrett P. SERVISS's The Moon Metal (1900), in which a MATTER TRANSMITTER is invented to obtain artemisium, a rare valuable metal, from the Moon.The years 1900-30 were largely those of scientific OPTIMISM, and in the pulps Hugo GERNSBACK was one of its prophets. Before founding AMAZING STORIES he did well with his magazine SCIENCE AND INVENTION, which featured much technological fiction. His own Ralph 124C 41+ (1911-12 Modern Electrics; fixup 1925) is one of the most celebrated of those novels whose raison d'etre is to catalogue the inventions of the future; they include tv.The discovery/invention story continued to pop up every now and then outside GENRE SF, as in C.S. FORESTER's The Peacemaker (1934), in which a pacifist invents a magnetic disrupter which stops machinery; E.C. LARGE's Sugar in the Air (1937), in which a process for artificial photosynthesis is discovered; and William GOLDING's play The Brass Butterfly (1956 as "Envoy Extraordinary"; 1958), in which a brilliant inventor in ancient Greece is given short shrift by his ruler, who sees the new inventions as an unpleasing threat to the status quo. But it was inside genre sf that the invention story found its true home, though tending to become more sombre when the central metaphor of Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein (1818) - the inventor being destroyed by his creation - was given contemporary relevance by the dropping of the atom bomb over Hiroshima. Even before that, stories featuring NUCLEAR POWER, such as Lester DEL REY's "Nerves" (1942), had been very much aware of the dangers of such inventions. John W. CAMPBELL Jr, both as a writer and as editor of ASF, was taking a gloomier view of technological advance by the late 1930s, although his own The Mightiest Machine (1934 ASF; 1947) had been a jolly romp, featuring the invention of a SPACESHIP which can take its energy direct from the stars. Campbell's ASF continued through the 1940s to publish a number of invention stories, in which scientific plausibility was emphasized as never before in genre sf. The results included Robert A. HEINLEIN's "Waldo" (1942 ASF as by Anson MacDonald; vt Waldo: Genius in Orbit 1958). This is a gripping, optimistic invention story; the term WALDO is still used today for remote-control devices. George O. SMITH's Venus Equilateral stories (ASF 1942-5; coll as Venus Equilateral 1947) feature much inventive work in radio COMMUNICATIONS across the Solar System. ASF's invention syndrome was given a boost by James BLISH's Okie stories, which feature the SPINDIZZY, one of the most attractive of all sf inventions; they appeared 1950-54, and in book form as the first 2 vols of the Cities in Flight tetralogy: Earthman, Come Home (1955) and They Shall Have Stars (1956 UK; vt Year 2018! US). ASF sometimes struck a lighter note vis-a-vis inventions, notably in the Galloway Gallegher stories (1943-8) by Lewis Padgett (Henry KUTTNER). These feature an inventor whose creative faculties are released by the intake of large quantities of alcohol, and his irritating robot sidekick; they were collected as Robots Have No Tails (coll of linked stories 1952) as by Kuttner. Meanwhile ASF's competitors were also featuring lighthearted invention stories alongside the more doom-laden variety. A notable example of the former was the Lancelot Biggs series of SPACE OPERAS by Nelson S. BOND, which appeared mostly in Fantastic Adventures (1939-40) and were collected in revised form as Lancelot Biggs: Spaceman (coll of linked stories 1950). Biggs, the thin genius who bumbles around but gets there in the end, is typical of sf's more stereotyped inventors. Many other relevant genre-sf stories are collected in Science Fiction Inventions (anth 1967) ed Damon KNIGHT.Many famous sf discoveries have been made through a process of CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH, and about 40 of them are discussed under that rubric. One in particular is worthy of attention here: "Noise Level" (1952) by Raymond F. JONES. In this tale, which in its emphasis on the potential power of the human mind sums up the whole ethos of Campbell's ASF, a counterfeit invention is the occasion of conceptual breakthrough. A group of scientists are shown an apparently bona fide film of an ANTIGRAVITY device, the inventor of which has been killed. In their attempt to duplicate it they break through to a new understanding of physics, only to discover that the original was a fraud, the stratagem having been devised to exert psychological pressure on them to rethink their worldviews.Discovery/invention themes still proliferate in sf, as by the nature of the genre they always will. Important examples from the 1950s onward have been: Fred HOYLE's Ossian's Ride (1959), in which a sinister-seeming cartel has cordoned off southwest Ireland as an invention-producing area; Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's Cat's Cradle (1963), in which havoc is wreaked by a newly discovered form of ice which freezes everything it touches; Isaac ASIMOV's THE GODS THEMSELVES (1972), in which a new energy source, the positron pump, is invented with a great show of plausibility; and Bob SHAW's Other Days, Other Eyes (fixup 1972), based on his short story "Light of Other Days" (1966), which features "slow glass", one of the most convincing and original inventions of sf (it slows down light, thus effectively allowing events to be viewed after a time-lapse; the privacy-invading social consequences are intriguingly explored). Arthur C. CLARKE's Fountains of Paradise (1979), a classically optimistic work of technological invention, envisages the building in a NEAR FUTURE Earth of a 36,000km (22,400 mile) tower to be used as a space elevator.One of the most interesting subthemes, which has persisted strongly into the 1990s, is found in stories relating the discoveries of ALIEN artefacts, very often with a subsequent desire to exploit them. Some, such as A.E. VAN VOGT's "A Can of Paint" (1944) and Robert SHECKLEY's "One Man's Poison" (1953; vt "Untouched by Human Hands") and "Hands Off" (1954), are basically comedies about the dangers of the incomprehensible ("One Man's Poison" contains the line "I don't eat anything that giggles"). But the theme has serious ramifications, too. Such stories often create a tension between the longing and wonder aroused by the thought that we are not alone, together with a sense of despair at the ambiguity of such objects and the doubt whether they will ever be understood. Such is Arthur C. Clarke's "Sentinel of Eternity" (1951; vt "The Sentinel"), the basis for the film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968); the story tells of the discovery of a strange monolith on the Moon. Clarke's RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA (1973) is entirely devoted to the exploration of, and failure to fully comprehend, a vast, apparently unmanned spaceship which enters the Solar System (BIG DUMB OBJECTS). The psychological repercussions of Man's inability to comprehend the alien are well explored in Frederik POHL's GATEWAY (1977), where abandoned alien spaceships are discovered and used, but not understood; the reaching out so symbolized is obsessive, seductive and murderous.GATEWAY and the subsequent novels in Pohl's Heechee series are sociologically almost the reverse of the ASF stories referred to above, perhaps reflecting the lowering of self-esteem and morale in the West from the late 1960s onward. Whereas ASF published tales of human ingenuity conquering the unknown, Pohl's stories envisage humanity as bewildered by the discovery of superior technology in much the same way as Bushmen in our own world might be baffled by the products of the industrial West. The metaphor for this in Arkady and Boris STRUGATSKI's novella "Piknik na obochine" (1972; trans as "Roadside Picnic" in Roadside Picnic/Tale of the Troika, coll 1977) is of humans discovering enigma as they scrabble like rats through trash left by alien picnickers. The theme, not always so pessimistically expressed, is common in the sophisticated new wave of 1980s space opera as represented by authors like Greg BEAR and Paul J. MCAULEY, and also by Charles SHEFFIELD's Divergence (1991). A GOTHIC-SF variant of the theme appears in the malign consequences of the discovery of a long-buried alien spacecraft on Earth in Stephen KING's The Tommyknockers (1987).

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