Ahead of Time:

Abstract

Looking back at his research on tachyons in the 1960s and 1970s, the physicist Gerald Feinberg recalled that he started thinking about particles that go faster than light after reading James Blish’s 1954 science fiction story “Beep.” While the technical conceits of Blish’s tale may have stirred Feinberg’s curiosity, its literary implications were yet more significant. As a story about faster-than-light messages that travel backward in time, “Beep” thematizes the capacity of speculative fictions to affect the present and reorient the future. For Feinberg, stories like “Beep” and Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 novel Childhood’s End offered conceptual resources as well as models for practice, affirming a science fiction way of doing science. By attending to Feinberg’s work on tachyons as well as his ventures in futurology, such as The Prometheus Project, this essay shows how Feinberg’s reading of science fiction reinforced a speculative approach to knowledge and innovation, an understanding of theoretical science as intimately aligned with science fiction, and a conviction that science fiction was a vital instrument for science policy and social change.