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On the shores of unexplored seas: Yesterday, today and tomorrow
The lure of science fiction: an insider's view
Tom Purdom
Why do people read science fiction? Christine Folch, a columnist for the Atlantic website, has come up with a new diagnosis for this pressing question.
Folch notes that the 19th Century German sociologist Max Weber believed people in the West were "disenchanted." Science has presented us with a world that is "explainable, predictable and boring," and this situation has led to a widespread loss of wonder. This woeful state has been abetted, furthermore, by the rise of government bureaucracies and impersonal market economies.
Science fiction restores that wonder, Folch argues, by reinserting "the speculative unknown into the very heart of the scientific process." (Read her column here.)
Folch is primarily writing about science fiction movies, and she has some interesting things to say about why science fiction films sell in some cultures and fall flat in others. But outsiders never see things quite the way insiders see them. For a science fiction writer like me, Folch's analysis seems naggingly out of focus.
"'Boring' accountants?
When I began reading science fiction in 1950, I didn't succumb to its charms because I was bored. You have to be semi-comatose to be bored at 14. The world around me hummed with interesting attractions. The most fascinating (and puzzling) attractions came packaged in skirts and dresses, but my personal list also included activities like model airplanes, rod and reel fishing and all the books I hadn't yet read.
Most of the adults I knew didn't seem bored either. Intellectuals and artists seem to be born with a hard-wired assumption that "ordinary life" is boring. They know they would be bored working at most jobs, so they assume everyone else is, too. But are they right?
Consider accounting, the classic example of a "boring" occupation. Do you really think people who wrestle with the complexities of the tax code are bored? Exasperated, perhaps. But I've never known an accountant who seemed bored by his work.
Poetic souls, then and now
Science fiction appealed to me as a teenager because it added a new type of excitement to my reading. It exposed me to the romantic and awe-inspiring possibilities inherent in its two basic subjects: the huge, mysterious universe that surrounds our tiny little planet, and the infinite, unpredictable future that stretches before us.
A science fiction writer named Joanna Russ once argued that new forms of literature come into existence to express new feelings. The emotion that generated science fiction, she said, is "awe and wonder at the physical universe, not as it is revealed to the senses, but as it is revealed to the mind."
For me, the major insight in that statement is contained in the last phrase. In the past, a poetic soul might feel awed by the few thousand stars you can see when you step outside at night and look at the sky. Today, you can stay indoors, curled up with a book about modern astronomy, and confront the far more awesome knowledge that you live in a galaxy with 200 billion stars, in a universe teeming with billions of galaxies.
3-D printing
You can't see that vision of the universe with your senses. It exists only in our minds. It's a mental picture pieced together with painstaking logic, based on observations made with instruments that detect phenomena that no human eye can detect.
And once you've seen that vision, questions arise: What's out there? Are there other worlds? Other civilizations?
The future raises similar questions. We've now lived through 250 years of steady technological change and all the social and political upheavals it creates. We know the future will be just as different from the present as the present is from the past. What will the world be like if we double our IQs? How will three-dimensional printing transform our economy and the day-to-day lives of the people who depend on it?
Shakespeare's wizards
When people live on the shores of unexplored seas, they concoct stories about the marvels and monsters that may be hidden on mysterious islands and unknown continents. Modern humans live, in effect, on the edge of two seas: the galaxy and the future.
Science fiction writers spin stories about those two seas in the same way that the Greeks told stories about islands in the Mediterranean and Shakespeare wrote about the wizards and spirits who inhabited an island in the Atlantic. Their work arises from an impulse that's been part of humanity's makeup since people first started sitting around campfires.
When I was 14, science fiction enticed my adolescent mind because it offered me visions of a future I was going to experience. Today, at 77, it offers me vicarious adventures in a future I won't live to see.
But the underlying message hasn't changed: The world is an exciting place. Human history has just begun. What's past is prologue.♦
To read responses, click here.
Folch notes that the 19th Century German sociologist Max Weber believed people in the West were "disenchanted." Science has presented us with a world that is "explainable, predictable and boring," and this situation has led to a widespread loss of wonder. This woeful state has been abetted, furthermore, by the rise of government bureaucracies and impersonal market economies.
Science fiction restores that wonder, Folch argues, by reinserting "the speculative unknown into the very heart of the scientific process." (Read her column here.)
Folch is primarily writing about science fiction movies, and she has some interesting things to say about why science fiction films sell in some cultures and fall flat in others. But outsiders never see things quite the way insiders see them. For a science fiction writer like me, Folch's analysis seems naggingly out of focus.
"'Boring' accountants?
When I began reading science fiction in 1950, I didn't succumb to its charms because I was bored. You have to be semi-comatose to be bored at 14. The world around me hummed with interesting attractions. The most fascinating (and puzzling) attractions came packaged in skirts and dresses, but my personal list also included activities like model airplanes, rod and reel fishing and all the books I hadn't yet read.
Most of the adults I knew didn't seem bored either. Intellectuals and artists seem to be born with a hard-wired assumption that "ordinary life" is boring. They know they would be bored working at most jobs, so they assume everyone else is, too. But are they right?
Consider accounting, the classic example of a "boring" occupation. Do you really think people who wrestle with the complexities of the tax code are bored? Exasperated, perhaps. But I've never known an accountant who seemed bored by his work.
Poetic souls, then and now
Science fiction appealed to me as a teenager because it added a new type of excitement to my reading. It exposed me to the romantic and awe-inspiring possibilities inherent in its two basic subjects: the huge, mysterious universe that surrounds our tiny little planet, and the infinite, unpredictable future that stretches before us.
A science fiction writer named Joanna Russ once argued that new forms of literature come into existence to express new feelings. The emotion that generated science fiction, she said, is "awe and wonder at the physical universe, not as it is revealed to the senses, but as it is revealed to the mind."
For me, the major insight in that statement is contained in the last phrase. In the past, a poetic soul might feel awed by the few thousand stars you can see when you step outside at night and look at the sky. Today, you can stay indoors, curled up with a book about modern astronomy, and confront the far more awesome knowledge that you live in a galaxy with 200 billion stars, in a universe teeming with billions of galaxies.
3-D printing
You can't see that vision of the universe with your senses. It exists only in our minds. It's a mental picture pieced together with painstaking logic, based on observations made with instruments that detect phenomena that no human eye can detect.
And once you've seen that vision, questions arise: What's out there? Are there other worlds? Other civilizations?
The future raises similar questions. We've now lived through 250 years of steady technological change and all the social and political upheavals it creates. We know the future will be just as different from the present as the present is from the past. What will the world be like if we double our IQs? How will three-dimensional printing transform our economy and the day-to-day lives of the people who depend on it?
Shakespeare's wizards
When people live on the shores of unexplored seas, they concoct stories about the marvels and monsters that may be hidden on mysterious islands and unknown continents. Modern humans live, in effect, on the edge of two seas: the galaxy and the future.
Science fiction writers spin stories about those two seas in the same way that the Greeks told stories about islands in the Mediterranean and Shakespeare wrote about the wizards and spirits who inhabited an island in the Atlantic. Their work arises from an impulse that's been part of humanity's makeup since people first started sitting around campfires.
When I was 14, science fiction enticed my adolescent mind because it offered me visions of a future I was going to experience. Today, at 77, it offers me vicarious adventures in a future I won't live to see.
But the underlying message hasn't changed: The world is an exciting place. Human history has just begun. What's past is prologue.♦
To read responses, click here.
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