I love Science Fiction. And I'm not getting tired to tell everyone that it is the most important genre of them all. And I'm not even kidding.
The main reason why I think that is because I love to be reminded from time to time of what an amazing project the human race is. And that we are on the way to something impossibly great. At every moment almost all people around the world are making plans for the future. It's what we do. It's what brought us down from the trees, out of the ocean, into the city and finally into space.
Compared to the life of a human only a few generations back, we achieved one impossible thing after another. We don't notice it, because the moment something can be done, it's done and we immediately get bored by it. That's why we are always on to the next thing. Who is really amazed by electricity? Be honest. And yet it's beyond magic from the standpoint of someone living in medieval times.
Science Fiction tries to make predictions about what is coming next. Often times it inspires people. Sometimes it's just a good example of what not to do. But it's always a good exercise to play things through in our heads. The human brain is a "what if"-machine. We can't even help it. Literature in general is the artistic expression of this - our state of mind, but SciFi especially.
Compared to other genres, science fiction comes with a few important rules. It has to be plausible, it has to explain why it is the way it is, and it has to be new. If you don't learn something from a SciFi story, it's either a bad one, or you haven't tried hard enough. But that's the goal.
SciFi is the mother of invention. Not always in the literal from. Sometimes it's just the wild imagination of some dude. But it is safe to claim that almost all inventors in the past have been inspired by SciFi, almost all politicians have been scared of it, and every kid has dreamed about what it's like to walk the moon.
Enough ... you get the point .. :)
Nice post :-) When I read this: "And yet it's beyond magic from the standpoint of someone living in medieval times.",it immediately brought to mind a quote I have hanging outside my lab at work--it is Clarke's third law, "Any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." ...so very true.
ReplyDeleteI just loving reading an old scifi, and then shaking my head while I think, wow--such a dreamer the author was, and he/she got it right.
We humans sure do like to wonder...and sometimes the best 'adventures' happen when we get lost while "wondering" in the last wilderness--the human mind.
Great blog...and I found my way here through a post Daniela put out on facebook :-)
Of course i had the great quote from ACC in mind also :) I'm also a fan of the golden days of SciFi (from heinlein to asimov). It's fun to spot where they have been terribly wrong also.
ReplyDeleteHeinlein for example didn't really think that computers would be that useful. So the navigators on a spaceship had to be great mathematicians.
The most prominent mistake in prediction probably was 1984. Not that surveillance technology didn't become commonplace, but as our dictators and elites got their hands on it .. so did the rest of us. So the effect on society was very different.
And still "big brother" became a meme and 1984 besides "Brave new world" probably the most influential SciFi story. One can argue that maybe it didn't happen the way he predicted because of the book. But personally, I don't think so. Oh boy .. this is a bit lengthy for a comment :) You get my point .. i love the stuff.