Mike the Martian and the Attack of the Argumentroid

One of the argumentroids of Robert Heinlein has annoyed me for years.

I was irked not the least because this particular argumentroid suckered me in my innocent youth, back when I was so proud of being a nonconformist, as were we all in my generation, and so proud of believing exactly what all the other nonconformists believed.

But let me first explain what my silly made-up word is supposed to mean.

I have always held that Science Fiction was never actually fiction stories about science. Instead, it is stories about fictional science. Writers routinely commended for the “hardness” of their hard SF, that is to say, commended for their realism, such as Larry Niven or Isaac Asimov or Arthur C Clarke, will introduce teleportation or psycho-history or faster than light drives or telepathy, none of which has any more scientific realism than flying carpets that run on happy thoughts and fairy dust.

And Robert Heinlein, the Dean of Science fiction, was like them a past master of the art of making their unscientific baloney seem scientific.

The writer’s chore is to lull the dragons of skepticism which guard the castle of the mind so that the waking dream of the tale can slip into the gates. The reader places himself into a half-hypnotic half-awake state known as “suspension of disbelief” where, for the sake of the story, the reader is willing to swallow the baloney if only his imagination is given enough excuse. In other words, it is not scientific accuracy that science fiction seeks or delivers, but scientific verisimilitude.

It is not supposed to be scientific, but scientifroid, if I may coin an awkward term for some hulking shape that looks vaguely like science in a dim light, but is not.

This is done in science fiction by mimicking some of the tropes of science. For example, Larry Niven posits in his ‘Known Space’ yarns that the law of conservation of momentum applies to teleportation booths, so that it is more expensive to teleport from the North Pole to the Equator than to the South Pole, because of the difference in angular momentum between a body at rest at either Pole versus a body being carried along at the speed of the rotation of the Earth. Teleportation is still hooey, but it seems more scientific if it suffers a reasonable scientific (or, rather scientifroid) limitation.

Now, it has been known since the ancient Greeks erected their first shrine to the Muses that poets and playwrights and novelists who have the craft of working this half-hypnotic trick of making the unlikely seem likely have a dangerous or divine power.

The novelist has the most powerful rhetorical tool of all at his command. He has an audience that willingly is attempting to suspend their disbelief for the sake of the story. This means, unfortunately, that a certain amount of mental litter, opinions, editorializing, propaganda and “spin” also can make it past the dragons of skepticism while they slumber.

And therein lies a certain danger, because the editorializing is not written like an editorial, where the readers knows the editor is opining an opinion; it is written like a tale. We judge editorials on their rhetorical skill and soundness of argument, their power to appeal to the passions and the reason. We judge tales on their entertainment value, their power to amuse and divert.

And, of course, the amusement value of any editorial hidden in a tale has nothing to do with the soundness of the argument given. If the reader already has a definite opinion opposing the writer’s, or if the reader has hair-triggered skepticism in general, will he be likely even to notice he is being played for a sap.

Because an editorial put across in a story will not actually put forth an argument, except on very rare occasions indeed. It put forth an argumentoid, a hulking shape that looks like an argument in a dim light.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.