Chance and Science Fiction: SF as Stochastic Fiction

Philip K. Dick in Solar Lottery and Gérard Klein in Le sceptre du hasard have both suggested that chance could be reintegrated, as a matter of choice, into the mechanisms of a “perfect” society. Chance finally subverts all laws, all rationalities, all determinisms; it reinstates chaos into order and sounds the knell for utopian visions of a perfectly regulated world. Though noting that chance also designates that indeterminacy which can be made consonant with technocratic rationality—and noting, too, that this sense of the word applies to a certain kind of utopian and science fiction—BE concentrates on chance as an oppositional force in the modern world. He seeks to demonstrate how, in relation to a variety of modern thinkers, the images of chance constitute themselves as the antithesis of those expressive of rational power and of the predictability of social change that goes with it. In this respect, SF becomes the literature of alternative realities subservient to chance, which represents the driving force behind the creation of fluid social metamorphoses. Indeed, BE cites a variety of stories—by Dick, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, and Michel Jeury—to prove that it is not far-fetched to think of SF as signifying “stochastic fiction.” (RMP)