| : Utilities of Fiction : Science Fiction : |
The Intelligent Designer
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from page 36 of "The Flocking Party" |
As I walk by the saltwater aquarium at school every week, I stop and wonder how the creatures, rocks, and chemicals packed in there are able make room for one another. They certainly didn't sign an agreement. Was the creator of this aquarium a benevolent, intelligent designer? And what of life on the rest of the planet? Where's our contract? What guides us? Is it an intelligent designer? Some groups today think so. The theory of intelligent design, for example, states that evolution is guided by a grand designer, because, it argues, molecular and ecological mechanisms found in nature are too complex to have evolved on their own (“Intelligent”). Intelligent design theory has persisted as a theory, which people believe is worth teaching in schools despite its total lack of scientific validity. This is a sure sign that complex systems like evolution are difficult enough to understand and too easily dismissed, precisely because of their complexity. The trouble of communicating how this kind of complexity operates has created a great amount of tension even beyond this debate. A globalized world is a lot like an aquarium and begs us to change the way that we think about others, including cultures, nations, political parties, media conglomerates, species, and whole ecologies. I believe that by developing more intuitive understandings of how evolution operates, we can produce better answers to the problem of understanding complexity. Creative work happens to be a process that is similar to evolution. So perhaps the arts, which develop more organically, are a model for nurturing intuition about this kind of process. I was conscious of evolutionary processes in writing my science fiction story, “The Flocking Party”. I constructed it much like an aquarium might form it. My undeveloped subjects and media were pooled into a framework. Once immersed, I facilitated these elements to interact. Rather than writing something once, I would rewrite, again and again, slowly mutating the system. I helped the elements make room for one another, but as they did so, they evolved into new forms with new sorts of relationships that I could not have predicted. My main character, Frank, gives the reader a first hand account of the selection pressures that any one individual faces inside such a dynamic system. He is forced to deal with the emotions that arise from his scientific epiphanies and their political implications or from his own wellbeing, which influences the questions he asks. Frank's surreal dreams are one way that we know he is thinking about the interest of others by projecting himself into the position of other species and organizations. In one dream he is an exterminator, killing birds (As much as it disturbs him)(Landau 14). In another his body is a neuron, infected with the crystalline structures produced by the Hebbets virus (Landau 21). Throughout my process I empathized most closely with Frank. This sort of role-playing to develop the story gave me a different understanding of an evolutionary process than if I had just read a textbook. I was forced to project myself in between the layers of opposing forces. |
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