I would like to discuss the difference, which seems to me important from a metaphysical point of view, between two regimes of fiction. Two regimes of fiction that concern experi-mental science, and for which I shall use two terms, one well known, the other my own coinage: Science Fiction, and Extro-science Fiction, SF and XSF.

Before even discussing the meaning of this difference, I would like to make something clear so as to avoid certain misunderstandings and possible objections. I shall define science fiction in what I believe to be fairly commonplace fashion, so as to clearly distinguish it from what I call extra-science fiction. But these definitions once given, you may perhaps suspect that the literary genre of science fiction itself already contains extro-science fictions - that there are

25

examples of XSF books within SF - and thus that the SF 26 genre contradicts the distinction I propose. I do not intend

to argue this point; my intention is rather to bring to light a conceptual distinction, and to demonstrate its philosophical interest. That done, the science fiction specialist can decide for himself whether or not extro-science fiction stories already exist in futuristic literature, and whether the science fiction genre itself comprises the proposed conceptual difference or not. My thesis is that, if such stories exist, whether or not they are inscribed within the SF genre, they belong in truth to something profoundly distinct from science fiction, and have a right on this basis to be considered in their singularity, to constitute in some way a 'genre within a genre', an 'empire within an empire'.

l. SCIENCE FICTION AND EXTRO-SCIENCE FICTION

Now let's proceed to make this distinction: SF/XSF. The relation of science to fiction in SF seems, generally

speaking, to be as follows: One imagines a fictional future for science which modifies, most often enlarges, the possibilities

of its knowledge and its mastery of the real. And we see the relation of man to the world alter along with this modifi- 27

cation of scientific knowledge, as it opens up unheard-of possibilities. In science fiction, possible futures - whatever great upheavals they herald- are retained within the sphere of science. All science fiction thus implicitly abides by the following axiom: In the anticipated future, it will still be possible to submit the world to scientific knowledge. Science may be profoundly transformed, but there will always be science. Whence, of course, the generic name for this type of writing: fiction can produce extreme variations, but within a science that, itself, always remains present, even if it becomes unrecognizable as its possibilities are transformed.

Now, what do we mean by the fiction of worlds outside science, or XSF? By the term 'worlds outside science' we do not mean worlds where science is simply absent - that is, worlds where, as a matter of fact, the experimental sciences do not exist: For example, worlds in which people have not, or have not yet, developed a scientific relation to the real. By 'worlds outside science', we mean worlds where experimental science is impossible in principle, rather than unknown in fact. Extra-science fiction thus defines a particular regime of the imaginary concerned with conceiving of worlds structured

- or rather, destructured- in such a manner that no experi-28 mental science can constitute its object within them. The

guiding question of XSF is: what could a world be like, for it to be in principle inaccessible to scientific knowledge; for it to be incapable of being established as the object of a natural science?

My intention here is to give a precise conceptual content to this definition - so far still very general and solely negative - of extra-science worlds. At the same time it is a question, for me, of demonstrating the properly speculative interest there might be, on one hand, in being conscious of the dif-ference between science fiction and extra-science fiction; on the other, of cultivating this type of imagination - distinct from that of SF - that would be XSF.

If I am interested in extro-science fiction, it is because it is the source of a very classical metaphysical problem, to which I have long dedicated myself: the problem of induction, or more precisely, the problem of the necessity of natural laws, as posed by philosopher David H ume in his Treatise q[Human Nature, and later in the Enquiry into Human Understanding. Now, this problem was, it seems to me, profoundly misun-derstood by one of the most important epistemologists of the twentieth century, Karl Popper. Popper has the honour

of being the first to refer to this problem of induction with the expression 'Hume's problem' . And to this problem he 29

claimed to have given a rigorous and original response. I shall begin by showing that Popper's misunderstanding of Hume owed precisely to the fact that he mistook an XSF problem for a SF problem. Popper posed an entirely different problem from that of Hume, one that implies the mobilisation of another type of imaginary. For if, as I believe, Hume mobilised the imaginary of extro-science fiction in posing his problem, Popper's problem can only be conceived within the imaginary of science fiction.

Secondly, I shall examine Kant's response to Hume's problem in the Critique qf Pure Reason, more precisely in the objective deduction of the categories. Unlike Popper, Kant had no illusions about the nature of Hume's problem. He responds on Hume's own terrain, which consists in creating a fiction of a world where science has become impossible. But I will be critical of Kant's thesis too, showing that the weakness of his transcendental deduction owes most notably to an insufficiently developed, rather limited, extro-scientific imaginary. Then I will show how a more acute sense of extra-science fiction allows us to launch another type of response to Hume's problem, one that is neither Popper's nor Kant's .

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2. TWO BILLIARDS MATCHES: HUME AND ASIMOV

The paradigmatic text in which Hume poses his famous problem of causal necessity consists in the fantastic descrip-tion of a billiards match during the course of which the laws of dynamics cease to apply:

When I see, for instance, a billiard ball moving in a straight line towards another; even suppose motion in the second ball should by accident be suggested to me, as the result of their contact or impulse, may I not conceive, that a hun-dred different events might as well follow from the cause? May not both these balls remain at absolute rest? /Vtay not the first ball return in a straight line, or leap off from the second in any line or direction? All these suppositions are consistent and conceivable. Why then should we give the preference to one, which is no more consistent or conceiv-able than the rest? All our reasonings a priori will never be able to show us any foundation for this preference.

The question H ume poses, through the use of these imaginary scenes, is that of knowing what truly guarantees - but also, what persuades us- that physical laws will continue to hold

in a moment's time, given that neither experience nor logic can assure us of this. For there is no logical contradiction in 3>

imagining that laws might change in future; and no experi-ence of the past constancy of law permits us to infer that this constancy will endure in future. Hume concludes that only the habit of past empirical constancies persuades us that the future will resemble the past - A psychological solution to the problem he set himself, and one that did not satisfy those who, after Hume, tried to resolve in their turn the challenge he issued to reason - principally, Kant and Popper.

Let's begin with the most recent solution: Popper's, as set out in his famous work The Logic qfScientijic Discovery, and pursued further in his later books.

The principle of Popper's solution is very simple: If we had asked Popper what guarantees that Hume's billiard balls will not adopt the fantastical behaviour described above, he would have responded not only that nothing could guarantee it, but moreover that this was a good thing, since there is nothing fantastic about these possibilities- they must be taken entirely seriously. Because, for Popper, our foreknowledge of the future consists in theoretical hypotheses that are essentially falsifiable by new, that is to say not yet canonised, scientific experiments. What makes a theory scientific for Popper is

precisely the fact that it is in principle experimentally falsifi-32 able. It is this intrinsic falsifiability of scientific conjecture

that explains the dynamism of experimental science, the incessant movement in whose course physicists advance to new hypotheses, recuse old ones, and submit rival theories to merciless testing.

In which case, there is no point asking, as did Hume, and the empiricists who came after him, what assures us that the sun will rise tomorrow, that every living being must die, or that bread nourishes. Nothing can- or should- assure us, for the good reason that these things are not at all necessary. Moreover, they do not always hold true. For, as Popper writes in Objective Knowledge:

In all three cases I found that these established laws were actually refuted in the sense in which they were originally meant. (a) The first was refuted when Pytheas of Marseilles discovered 'the frozen sea and the midnight sun'. The fact that (a) was intended to mean 'Wherever you go, the sun will rise and set once in 24 hours' is shown by the utter disbelief with which his report was met, and by the fact that his report became the paradigm of all travellers' tales. (b) The second - or rather, the Aristotelian theory on which

it is based- was also refuted ... by the discovery that bac-teria are not bound to die, since multiplication by fission 33

is not death, and later by the realization that living matter is not in general bound to decay and to die, although it seems that all forms can be killed by sufficiently drastic means. (Cancer cells, for example, can go on living.) (c) The third- a favourite of 1-/ume's - was refuted when people eating their daily bread died of ergotism, as happened in a catastrophic case in a French village not very long ago.

Returning to the case of the billiard balls' impact, if we follow Popper we must say that they might indeed behave in unprecedented ways in future - either because one has modified the circumstances of the experiment- for example metallising the balls and introducing a powerful magnetic field; or if, someday, one discovers a way of altering the gravitational field in which their movement takes place.

Now, why did I say that this solution rests on a misin-terpretation of the original problem formulated in Hume's Enquiry? Let us remark first of all that the Popperian solution belongs to an imaginary homogeneous with that of science fiction. For what does falsificationism require us to admit concerning a scientific theory? That in future the theory may

be falsified in favour of other theories completely unenvisaged 34 at present. The examples Popper gives of such refutations

belong, of course, to the past; but the principle of his episte· mology consists in projecting into the future the possibility of scientific ruptures equal in radicality to those that have already taken place - those which have seen, for example, Newtonian theory superseded by theories as revolutionary and unforeseeable to men of the eighteenth century as general relativity or quantum physics . Even if we cannot know, or foresee, what a future physics or a future biology might be, we must accept the possibility of an experimental science to come, as incommensurable with present science as present science might have been with that of past eras. In order to accede to the Popperian epistemology, it is very much a matter of conceiving of science fiction, but an indeterminate science fiction- because, rather than inventing the positive content of a future science, we content ourselves with positing the being - perhaps radically other in relation to our current knowledge - of such a content to come.

So how does Popper misconstrue Hume? Well, Pop· per actually poses the following problem: Can our theories be refuted in the future by new experiences? His problem is epistemological, it concerns the nature of our scientific

knowledge. It is not ontological, like Hume's problem. The latter is not simply about the stability of scientific theory, but 35

about the stability of the processes themselves that physical laws describe. Popper does not confront this problem at all. Popper tells us that new experiences could refute our theories; but he never doubts that the existing, canonic experiments will always produce the same results in future. Given exactly similar circumstances, the same experiments will always yield the same results; only unprecedented circumstances can yield unprecedented results. We can see this very well in the examples he gives: It is only in proximity to the pole that the sun ceases to rise every twenty-four hours; it is only because of a bacteria that bread ceases to nourish and instead kills. Never, in unchanged circumstances, will we see the sun suddenly cease to obey gravity and, for a change, take a trip outside of the system that bears its name; nor will bread identical in its composition to that which nourishes, become for no reason deadly to whoever eats it. For if this were to occur, we would no longer be dealing with a science obliged to overturn its theories on account of new experi-ences; we would be dealing with an experimental science that had become impossible, with the collapse of the laws of physics themselves.

Now, it is this hypothesis of a future world where science 36 itself would become impossible that is the real problem

posed by Hume. Popper's problem- what guarantees our theories?- is a science fiction problem, a problem driven by a fiction that presupposes that there will always be a possible science in the future. But Hume's problem mobilises another imaginary, the imaginary of extro·science fiction, a fiction of a world become too chaotic to permit any scientific theory whatsoever to be applied to reality anymore. And here one can see very well that the difference between the two regimes of fiction- SF and XSF- has real metaphysical stakes, since Popper's misconstrual of it led him to conflate his own, epistemological, problem with Hume's ontological problem.

To sum up the difference between Hume's problem and Popper's, we can reprise the example of the billiard ball's fantastic trajectory: According to H ume the question is: What guarantees that the ball will not adopt a trajectory that is not only unforeseen, but in principle unforeseeable- which can· not be modeled, since it escapes not only every known law, but any law that might conceivably be known? According to Popper, the question is: What guarantees that unprecedented circumstances, combined with as-yet unknown laws, may not permit us, at some indeterminate future time, to send the ball

on a trajectory that is completely unforeseen, although in principle foreseeable for a future science? The first question 37

goes beyond the limits of science fiction, whereas the second belongs wholly within them.

Now, there exists a science fiction text that illustrates perfectly this difference- so perfectly, it is as if it were written specifically for this purpose. It is Isaac Asimov's story 'The Bil-liard Ball', the last in the collectionAsimov 's Mysteries, whose conceit is to combine the SF tale with the detective mystery; where Asimov amuses himself by fusing the 'whodunnit' a la Agatha Christie with the SF genre. In 'The Billiard Ball', Asimov narrates the tale of a suspect endowed with a genius for theoretical physics, specializing in the Theory of General Relativity - a suspect in a murder perpetrated by means of a billiard ball. Now, as we shall see, the whole intrigue lies precisely in the unexpected trajectory of a billiard ball; but the question at the heart of this intrigue is none other than that of whether we address this inexplicability from within the framework of Popper's problematic - within the arena of the science fiction imaginary - or within the framework of Hume's problematic.

All will become clear once we explain the plot: The narrator, a science journalist, intimates, in personal notes,

that he suspects the greatest scientist of his time, Professor 38 James Priss, of having perpetrated a murder. Here are the

events he recounts: James Priss, though more acclaimed than any other scientist of his time, has always remained in the shadow of Edward Bloom, who, lacking theoretical talent, nevertheless exhibits a great genius for applying the most abstract thinking of his time, in particular Priss's. Bloom is a sort of super-Edison, become both extremely rich and celebrated through his concrete inventions and their consider-able financial consequences - more so than Priss, who has never surpassed the limited renown of a professional scientist. An implicit rivalry and a sort of mutual jealousy develops between the two men, each of whom secretly envies the type of knowledge enjoyed by the other; a rivalry that crystallises in the weekly billiards match that Priss and Bloom have habitually observed, since their youth, both being known as redoubtable players.

This hostility, masked by amicable and civil outward behavior, is to explode into the light of day when Bloom claims to have applied Priss's theory of the anti-gravitational field. In this theory, which won him a second Nobel prize, Priss foresaw the theoretical possibility of annulling all gravi-tational effects by countering gravity with an electromagnetic

field. Only, according to Priss, this theoretical possibility is impossible in practice, since the electromagnetic field necessary 39

for the effect would have to be infinite and is thus technically unrealizable. Bloom disagrees with this, and announces that he will create an anti-gravity machine without an infinite electromagnetic field. Tension mounts between the two men, their reputations staked on the affair; until, a year on, Bloom announces that he has succeeded. He invites the world's press and television to attend the first public demonstration of his success. And of course, he also perfidiously invites Profes-sor Priss to witness before the whole world the marvelous application of his brilliant theory.

With everyone present, Bloom leads the audience to his laboratory, where a device awaits that stupefies them all. At the centre of the room, amidst numerous pieces of equipment, stands a billiards table; and at the centre of this table there is a luminous, vertical ray. Bloom now gives the following explanation: he has never before tried out his antigravity ray on a material object, even though he is sure it will work. For he wished to leave to Priss the honour of doing so, by sending a billiard ball beneath the central ray - a supreme perversion which, under cover of an homage to the scientist, condemns him to making himself ridiculous before the

entire world by giving credit to his rival in a game of bil-•o liards that he will have lost forever. According to Bloom's

predictions, they will see the ball become weightless in the ray, and slowly rise to its highest point. The audience wear sunglasses because of the brightness of the beam, so they cannot see Priss's expression at the moment when Bloom makes this announcement. At first paralysed, Priss seems to come to himself. He approaches the table and slowly takes aim; he strikes the ball, which takes a complicated trajectory, rebounding and finally entering the ray. A thunderous noise is heard, everyone panics; and when calm returns, Bloom is discovered dead, a hole bored through his chest the precise size of a billiard ball.

A totally unforeseen event thus comes to pass - the ball has followed a trajectory aberrant not only to our physics, real physics, but also to the fictive physics ofPriss and Bloom. If the story was H umean - that is, an extra-science fiction story- then there would be nothing more to say about this aberrant event, and the plot would leave us high and dry. But luckily, it is a science fiction story- Popperian, not Humean - and the plot ends in a brilliant denouement. For Priss, in the story, explains what he had not at first realized - for, he says, it is well-known that he thinks slowly- namely, that

an object exempt from gravitation would not move with the serenity of a weightless object, but would be displaced 41

at the speed of an object without mass, that is to say at the speed of a photon, the speed oflight. The tale thus ends with the narrator anxiously wondering whether, confronted with the risk of his reputation being ruined in front of everyone, Priss had realized what would happen, and taken the time to calculate the angle required for the billiard ball to avenge him forever against his rival.

As we can see, the story functions because it is Pop-perian. For it rests on the fact that the totally unforeseen event was not unforeseeable in principle, since the laws of physics could explain it. The crux of the story is precisely the forever-unprovable possibility that Priss had in fact foreseen what was going to happen. Prevision must be possible, for the story to function: thus, the event must be subject to a law, even if the latter is so unprecedented that our suspicion must remain forever a suspicion.

Beyond the case of this story, a more general conclusion seems to emerge concerning the value, this time not meta-physical but properly literary, of our two regimes of fiction. It seems that only science fiction permits the construction of a fictional framework, of a narrative - fantastic maybe, but

certainly coherent. For in science fiction, we generally inhabit 42 a world in which physics is other, but not one where laws are

abolished pure and simple, where everything and anything can happen, for no reason whatsoever, at any moment. Tales can be told because we are still involved in worlds -ordered totalities - even if it they are governed by another order. Individuals can act in them - and even premeditate murder- because they can always foresee the consequences of their actions. In extro-science fiction, on the other hand, it would seem that no order of any type whatsoever can be constituted, and that consequently no story whatsoever can be narrated. If this is true, then we are wrong in speaking of extro-science 'worlds' - since a world incapable of giving rise to science would not be a world but a pure chaos, a pure diversity ordered by nothing. This is precisely Kant's thesis, and his way of resolving Hume's problem: If laws were not necessary, according to Kant, then no world, and no consciousness, could emerge; there would be only a pure manifold, with no cohesion. Now, we shall try to show that this thesis is contestable; because in truth, an extro-science world, and even a plurality of such worlds, are conceivable. So, we shall try to establish both the metaphysical validity of such worlds, by making them worlds whose possibility

one cannot deny; and their literary value, by making them the possible milieu for a fictional armature. 43

3. THE TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION AND THE THREE TYPES OF XSF WORLD

Kant's response to Burne's challenge belongs, in the Critique rif Pure Reason, to the moment of the transcendental deduc· tion, more precisely the moment of the objective deduction of the categories. It is obviously impractical to reiterate this in detail here, but let us recall the general strategy.

Kant certainly wishes to legitimate our belief in the necessity of physical laws. But he does not want to do so as a speculative metaphysician such as Leibniz would have. A Leibnizian, faced with Burne's challenge, would doubtless have responded that it is possible to prove the existence of a beneficent God, who has it in his heart to create and maintain the best of all possible worlds- namely, ours. The constancy of the world, from this point of view, owes itself to the wisdom and beneficence of a sovereign Being. Kant does not proceed in this way, because he recuses in general

all forms of speculative thought. His strategy is rather to 44 attempt an ad absurdum proof of the constancy of physical

laws. This proof can be summarised as follows: Hume asks what allows us to exclude the eventuality of those fantastic trajectories of the billiard balls he gives us to imagine, on the basis of a pure inconstancy of physical law. The principle of the Kantian response is as follows: This scene we imagine could never really be perceived, because what would render it possible - the contingency of the laws of nature -would render impossible all perception and all consciousness of an object. For if the scene of Hume's billiard balls is imaginable as a scene, it is because the 'background' against which the balls frolic, itself remains stable: The billiard table, the smoky room in which the match is held, the players themselves - in short the whole context surrounding the billiard balls - contradicts the supposed hypothesis of the contingency of laws. This context testifies, more broadly, to the persistence of the world that surrounds the balls, that is to say of a nature that remains impeccably obedi-ent to the laws of nature. Now, if the laws of nature fail for the balls, they must fail in general; and then the world itself would crumble, and with it, of course, any subjective representation of it.

The fault ofHume's argument, according to Kant, is that he dissociates the conditions of science from the conditions 45

of consciousness. For H ume gives us a situation where we are conscious of a world in which science has become impossible; a world in which we can still perceive objects - the billiard table, the balls- but where these objects might do anything whatsoever. But for Kant, consciousness without science is nothing but the ruin of all reasoning: Consciousness would not survive the absence of science; which proves the impos-sibility of any such failure of science and of the laws of nature one day manifesting itself to us.

Broadly speaking, Kant's approach is as follows: Suppose that laws cease to govern the given and that objects lose their constancy; Science would then become impossible, but we could never perceive it; at most we might dream it. Because the difference between perception and dream, for Kant, passes uniquely (and this is a consequence of his idealism) through the difference between objects that obey physical constancy and those that do not. If natural things were to cease to obey causal connection, everything would take on the cast of a dream, and we could no longer assure ourselves in any case that we had perceived a strange phenomenon, rather than having dreamt or fantasised it.

This phase of Kant's deduction can be illustrated by the 46 oneiric scene of the cinnabar, in the subjective deduction:

If cinnabar were sometimes red, sometimes black, some-times light, sometimes heavy, if a man changed into this and sometimes into that animal form, if the country on the longest day were sometimes covered in fruit , sometimes with ice and snow, my empirical imagination would never find opportunity when representing red color to bring to mind heavy cinnabar.

We should emphasise here that the imaginary convoked by Kant, in which everything takes on the consistency of a dream, is an imaginary homogenous with that mobilised by H ume in his scene of the billiards, namely an extro-science imaginary, an XSF imaginary. Kant, as I have said, no longer makes the mistake Popper did. He does not mistake an XSF problem for an SF problem. He confronts Hume on his own ground - the real without laws - and opposes him with his own idea of chaos. Chaos versus chaos, cin-nabar versus billiards: The first victim of Kantian chaos is that perception becomes indiscernible from phantasm. But Kant's chaos is even more intense than that described

in the 'cinnabar' scene. For if laws were to disappear, then according to Kant the real would no longer even have the 47

consistency of a dream, in which I still manage to discern things: cinnabar that decomposes, people who transform, a landscape where the seasons speed along. A real without laws, in truth, would be far too unstable to permit these identities-in-becoming to be adumbrated: everything would implode, and even the consciousness I have of myself within time would not survive, for my memory of my own persist-ence would disappear along with the insubstantial remainder of those things the dream would still accord me. All that would remain would be a pure chaotic manifold, without consciousness or consistency.

As we can see, then, Kant's proof is a proof by fact: Since the hypothesis of the contingency of the laws of nature would imply, if it were true, the abolition of any presentation of the world, the fact that there is a representation of the world is a refutation of the H umean thesis. And it should be added- I shall return to this - that at the same time that this thesis of the contingency of physical laws is disqualified, the XSF imaginary as possible literary genre also seems condemned in advance by the Kantian approach. Because such an XSF imaginary seems destined to degenerate into the monotony

of a pure chaos, a pure diversity, within which nothing can .s be distinguished from anything else.

Nevertheless, this remark on the XSF imaginary allows us to put our finger, I think, on a possible weakness in the Kantian solution. For what does prevent us, after all, from imagining extra-science worlds far more stable, and by the same token more interesting, than those described by Kant? Why indeed can't one imagine worlds that do not obey necessary laws, rather unstable worlds, capable of absurd behaviours here and there, but on the whole regular - a regularity that does not at all result from necessary causal processes? In other words, what allows Kant to exclude the possibility that there could exist worlds that are in fact regular, but whose regularity does not proceed from necessary laws? Why should a world without laws self-evidently be so frenetically inconstant?

Kant tells us: were our world not governed by necessary laws, nothing would subsist of it. But we want to respond that a world that obeys no law has no more reason to be chaotic than to be ordered. It must be able to be, indifferently, one or the other, precisely because nothing stops it from being either. It seems to me that here Kant relies on an implicit law that allows him to assert an identity between a world

without necessity and radical chaos: It is a probabilistic law. Kant's reasoning here rests on the following argument: If the 49

world were deprived of laws, if the least of its components could behave in any way whatsoever at every moment, it would be an extraordinary chance if it displayed the kind of enduring and global order that, for example, characterises the nature we know. But if this is Kant's argument, we could easily reply that a world that obeys no law has no reason to obey any probabilistic or statistical law whatsoever. Nothing prevents such a world from composing, even against all sane probability, a global order that would constitute a world, an order certain aspects of which might, however, go off the rails at any moment, like Burne's billiard balls. From which we discern that the weakness of the transcendental deduction proceeds from its insufficient practice of the XSF imaginary. For a more acute XSF imagination would have prohibited Kant from excluding the possibility, either that the world could in future transform into a lawless world, or even that we already live in such a world, although the chaotic detail does not appear to us in any obvious fashion. Consequently, Kant's resolution of the Humean enigma - how to prove the necessity of physical laws, their future persistence- this

resolution via the transcendental deduction would not seem so quite as satisfying as it first appeared.

If we try, in turn, to deepen the hypothesis of extra-science worlds, we will see that Kant's thesis according to which consciousness and science have the same conditions of possibility - namely, the necessity of physical laws - does not stand up to analysis. For we can fictionalise as many worlds as we wish that blatantly contradict this hypothesis.

In fact, we can conceive of three types of extro-science worlds, only one of which corresponds to that described by Kant, the two other types deviating from his limited imaginary:

'Ijpe 1 Worlds: All possible worlds that would be irregular, but not enough to affect science or consciousness. Worlds, then, that are not 'extro-science' in the strict sense since they still allow the exercise of science; but that nevertheless contradict the thesis according to which the strict neces-sity of laws is a condition for the existence of science and consciousness alike.

These worlds contain causeless events, but ones that occur too 'spasmodically' to jeopardise consciousness or science. Such events consist in causal ruptures that are observable, but impossible to reproduce in any regular fashion.

Such worlds do not endanger science, because science is structurally indifferent to events that can give rise to indi- s1 vidual testimonies, but not to a protocol for their reproduc-tion. If, in such a world, someone claims to have observed the billiard balls in his drawing room do all sorts of strange things for a good few minutes, scientists can say nothing of it - not because they doubt the good faith of the spectator, not even because they suppose him mad, or the victim of an hallucination; simply because science cannot do anything with events whose observation admits of no assured procedure of reproducibility. Even if there were multiple testimonies concerning unlikely physical events, and even if one were to suppose a world in which these events were indeed physi-cally absurd, experimental science could - literally - have nothing to do with them, and would not even be endangered, since its proper domain - experiments, experiences that are reproducible- would remain intact in the face of such chaos. For science, any spasmodic event without cause is either nonexistent, or has a cause that is not yet attestable -and is thus of no consequence in its own right.

As to consciousness, there is no more reason why it should perish than science. Dream and hallucination would continue to exist, and exist qua distinct from perception and

from the sudden production of absurd phenomena. Certainly, s2 each witness of a causeless event might in principle question

himself as to whether it was not dreamt or hallucinated, but there would be precise reasons for him to suppose this not to be the case. For in this type of world, regular for the most part, he could consider that the context of the event was not identical to that of a dream (he was not asleep, he did not feel himself wake up after having made the observation), nor to that of hallucination (in this world hallucination would be linked to certain known pathologies) . Further, he could appeal, in certain cases, to a criteria of intersubjectivity, for it could be that these events happen before a multitude of witnesses, who would thus guarantee for each other that they were not dreaming.

Since non-causal worlds of type 1 are thinkable without contradiction, this shows that neither science nor conscious-ness have as their condition of possibility the strict universal applicability of the principle of causality.

'Ijpe 2 Worlds: Worlds whose irregularity is sufficient to abolish science but not consciousness. These are the real extro-science worlds.

This would be a world in which experiments in the labora-tory give the most diverse results, abolishing the possibility

of constituting a natural science. But it would be, at the same time - quite inconsequentially - a world in which everyday 53

life would still be possible, on the basis of relative stabilities. A world in which there would be 'accidents of things' , sudden slippages of material objects- accidents too rare to destroy all human life, but not rare enough to allow scientific experiment to be conducted with confidence. A world whose margins had become capricious, but with a caprice that did not belong to any hidden intentionality. This would be a world where one could only hold on to a chronics of things - for example one might say, supposing that we speak in the vocabulary of our own scientific theory: 'between this and that date, nature "in the laboratory" stopped being relativistic, and regressed to a Newtonian dynamics; from this date to this date, there was a true renewal of quantum physics, but only in laboratories in the southern hemisphere,' etc. One could no longer, therefore, extract properly scientific laws from the course of nature. But let us be more precise: in truth, no manifest irregularity could suffice to prove that there wasn't some hidden law, subjacent to the apparent disorder. Whatever the manifest disorder, one might always - as Bergson emphasized, after Leibniz - find within it an unknown order, or one that does not correspond to the order we expected. One can therefore

always imagine, in an extro-science world, that there exists s• some hidden law beneath the apparent disorder of natural

chronics. But in such a world, those who persisted in seeking such a secret law beneath the absurd variations of nature would seem as eccentric or vain as those who still seek, in our own world, a quantitative law that would explain the course of human history.

In such a world, we would be in the middle of things, a little like a driver surrounded by other vehicles: we could rely in general on reasonable behavior on the part of the real, but we could never rule out nature's behaving absurdly, just as we can never exclude pulling up alongside a driver who doesn't respect the highway code. An acute vigilance would thus be the consequence of such a nature- subject to sudden 'crashes', but still predictable for the most part. Road accidents can be submitted to frequentialist laws, and it is indeed upon such frequencies that we base our vigilance, even if we don't have in our mind any exact evaluation of risks. The same would go for a world of type 2: our trust in the behavior of reality would be sufficient to act and to live, even if in a painfully uncertain way. In a more general sense, natural regularity would be analogous to social regularity: stable for the most part, but capable of unforeseeable derailments.

But to accord such a 'social' predictability to the type 2 world, wouldn't that be, after all, to admit that a beginnings 55

of a natural - even statistical - science would still be pos-sible therein? To render the analogy between the two types of regularity - type 2 nature and society - more precise, and to permit us to think the world free of all experimental science, we must add an historical dimension to it. Suppose then that a man living at the end of the eighteenth century had tried to evaluate the approximate frequency of horse-and-carriage accidents in the Paris of his time. If this man had known that the number of such accidents in Paris in the twenty-first century would be close to zero, he would have been able to deduce that progress in equine safety had made a great leap from one century to the other. And this, because he would not have been able to foresee the almost total disappearance of horse-drawn carriages in Paris, in favour of a mode of transport non-existent in his own time. Thus, social regularity, which allows us to base our lives on quantifiable probabilities as to others' behavior, despite its unpredictability in individual cases, goes hand-in-hand with the possibility of historical change, which is unforeseeable in a more profound sense, since it cannot be submitted to any quantitative law whatever. And yet, these changes of epoch,

impossible to inscribe in causal laws of an experimental s6 type, have not suppressed all trace of social regularity, even

during the greatest historical upheavals, that is to say dur-ing transitions from one era to another. We could then say that, in the same way, the denizens of type 2 worlds would also know 'transitions between natural eras', linked to pro-gressive - but profoundly unforeseeable - transformations in everyday constancies. But this time, contrary to what one might ultimately suspect to be the case with historical change, these transformations would be entirely free from any attestable cause: they would introduce 'epochs' in nature, whose long-term modifications would be compounded with short term 'leaps'.

In short: such a nature, capable of marginal caprices, and of epochal modifications, is thinkable without contra-diction - and with it we think an unbinding rifthe conditions rif possibility rif science from those rif consciousness. A world in which the conditions of science disappear is not necessarily a world in which the conditions of consciousness would also be abolished. Consciousness without science is not the ruin of thought.

'Ijpe 3 World>: Finally, the third type of extro-science world, if not this time world>, since they represent lawless universes

in which disordered modifications are so frequent, that, like the chaos described by Kant in the objective deduction, the s?

conditions of science and those of consciousness alike, are abolished.

We see then that, amongst the three categories of universe that we have fictionalized, two contradict the transcendental deduction, and one constitutes a proper extro-science world: the world of type 2, world XSF-2.

CONCLUSION

To conclude, I should like briefly to address the question whether XSF could constitute a literary genre, like science fiction (if we at least agree that science fiction is a genre). Could there be - under what conditions could there be -XSF stories? Or even: are there already stories of this type, branded 'science fiction', but which my efforts here expose as truly belonging to another type of imaginary?'

* I must thank Tristan Garcia, to whom I owe many pointers for research into this matter. that I have not been able to pursue here as thoroughly as I would have liked.

The difficulty in writing XSF stories- and what, I think, ss condemns them to constitute isolated singularities, is that

one begins with what would normally be excluded from nar-ration: Not just pure arbitrariness, but an arbitrariness that can strike again and again, at any moment. If the reader of science fiction is ready to allow futuristic writers postulates as fantastic as can be, he nevertheless then expects the author to stick rigorously to those postulates, and not to introduce into the world he has created ruptures without any cause or reason, which would remove any interest in the narrative as a whole. To get around this difficulty it seems to me there could be three solutions, although this list does not claim to be exhaustive:

l.

The first solution consists of introducing just one rupture without cause or reason, a sort of unique physical catastrophe, that at once plunges the protagonist into a world where some inexplicable physical phenomenon has been produced, on a massive scale. The standard novel of 'XSF catastrophe' is Rene Barjavel's Ravage, in which electricity suddenly no longer exists, without the slightest explanation of this phe-nomenon being given. It has certainly been said more than

once that this novel, published in 1943, recalls disagreeably the 'return to the earth' promised by Petain at the time. s9

What is nevertheless interesting in this story, whatever else one thinks of it, is that it transposes into nature an historical catastrophe - the debacle of May 1940 - along with one of the consequent ordeals - the extinguishing of lights, the blackout imposed in occupied Paris for sixteen hours. This reiterates the comparison I sketched between Type 2 worlds and the radicality of unforeseen historical events.

2. Second solution: nonsense. One can accommodate oneself to multiple arbitrary events, rather than reducing them to one unique event, if the author plays about, producing absurd and unexpected situations. In fact, worlds of type 2 possess a certain vis comica, a certain burlesque potential, which could be exploited. One might think here of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which a machine that generates extremely improbable events transforms some missiles into a whale and a bowl of petunias. But here it is still a matter of a machine obeying the laws of chance, and susceptible to probabilistic- if perfectly deliri-ous - reasoning.

3· 6o Finally, the last solution- the one that expresses most faith-

fully the XSF genre: stories of uncertain reality, those in which the real crumbles gradually, from one day to the next ceasing to be familiar to us. I have not yet found any novel that is, in this domain, properly XSF - that is to say one that gives no explanation whatever for the lawless decomposition of its environment and characters. But we might think of one of Philip K Dick's masterpieces, Ubik, in which the real ages, or regresses, without any apparent logic: the atmosphere is close to XSF-2 worlds, if one leaves aside the explanation given by the author, namely that it is a question of the psychic world of a cryogenically-frozen body, slowly devoured by a comatose child with monstrous mental powers.

So, three solutions for possible XSF stories: the catastrophe, nonsense, and the dread uncertainty of an atmospheric novel. Undoubtedly not quite enough to constitute a genre - in which respect XSF, which possesses a certain metaphysical interest, probably possesses less potential than science-fiction from a literary point of view - at least, that is, unless some talented authors one day prove me wrong.