A century after the publication of the general theory of relativity, sci-fi is still grappling with its implications, and still trying to explain it to the rest of us

A century after Albert Einstein formulated general relativity, the theory holds a profoundly strange place in modern life. On one hand, it underwrites all the marvels of technology today, from smartphones to space probes. We wouldn’t be tweeting from orbit around Mercury without the physics Einstein published in 1915. On the other hand, while a fair number of people can tell you what special relativity’s E=MC2 stands for, a vanishingly small number can claim to really understand the universe as Einstein’s famous equation reveals it to us.

The popular understanding of relativity comes almost entirely from science fiction. A crew of astronauts crash land on a planet populated by apes, where humans are mutes kept as cattle. But it’s only when Charlton Heston screams “You maniacs, you blew it up!” at Lady Liberty that the other moon boot drops: we’re on Earth after a nuclear apocalypse, transported into the future as a result of time dilation, an effect of relativity predicted by Einstein’s theory.

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Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel La Planète des Singes, via its Hollywood movie adaptation, arguably remains the most famous illustration of relativity in sci-fi. But Boulle’s story is less about science than it is about humanity, with time dilation simply providing what the critic Darko Suvin describes as the “novum”, the pivotal idea around which any sci-fi metaphor is constructed. Boulle exploits relativity to transport his readers into the future – but only to show us the folly of the present.

For most of the 20th century, SF went out of its way to dodge relativity. The postulation of warp engines, hyperdrives and other varieties of faster-than-light (FTL) transportation is less a scientific idea than a dramatic device. In space opera novels such as Frank Herbert’s Dune or CJ Cherryh’s Alliance-Union series, FTL is first and foremost a way to play out human political dramas that would be impossible if it took eight centuries to travel between locations. We want stories told on a human scale, but on the scale of a relative universe, human stories don’t even register.

Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero won the Hugo award for best novel in 1971 for it’s hard-edged take on relativity and space travel. Fifty colonists travel from Earth on a Bussard ramjet-powered spacecraft. An onboard malfunction causes the ship to continue accelerating endlessly, taking ship and crew far beyond the limits of light-speed, flying between galaxy superclusters with all they know left billions of years in the past.

From its title – a reference to the Lorentz equations that underpin relativity – to Anderson’s frequent authorial interventions explaining the science of relativity, Tau Zero dedicates itself to showing us a relativistic model of the universe. And yet the result is still much like a fairy tale transposed to space; a galactic Hansel and Gretel, of men and women lost in a star-strewn wilderness. However hard we try, we can only conceive of the weirdness of relativity through the mundanity of stories already known.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest It’s all relative … Planet of the Apes (1968), adapted from Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel, is one of the most famous illustrations of the concept of time dilation. Photograph: 20th Century Fox/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Conjuring stories on the scale of a relativistic universe is among the greatest challenges in modern SF writing. Alastair Reynolds pushes the possibilities of sub-light empire-building to their limits in House of Suns, where human civilisations rise and fall in cycles of a few millennia without breaking Einstein’s laws of physics. Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep incorporates the tricky question of consciousness into relativity, describing a galaxy in which the speed of thought increases the further life travels away from the “unthinking depths” of the galactic core.

In Shikasta, the wide-ranging imagination of Doris Lessing took the union of consciousness and physics to its ultimate conclusion, in a universe where travel between worlds is achieved by the passage through higher planes of existence that we would probably recognise as forms of heaven or nirvana. It’s one of SF’s strange conundrums, that the further it projects hard scientific fact into our future, the more it arrives back at a vision that echoes the myths of spirituality and religion.

“Reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted,” jokes William Mandella in The Forever War. Joe Haldeman’s SF classic makes a beautiful literary device of time dilation and relativity, as its protagonist is sent on multiple tours of duty in a war against aliens that explicitly echoes Haldeman’s own experiences in the Vietnam war. Every time Mandella returns home he is further forward in human history, and further isolated from the world he knew.

It’s the illusory, observer-oriented nature of reality that the theory of relativity brings us crashing up against. As we live them, the moments of our lives seem solidly real. But look at them through the lens of spacetime and they will be, in the words of Roy Batty, the replicant from Blade Runner whose inception date was 8 January 2016, “lost in time, like tears in rain”. A century after Einstein’s equations revealed a universe that humanity can never truly perceive, sci-fi has only just begun to let us see, however imperfectly, through eyes that can.

