The Vagaries of Science Fiction

A friend of mine sent me a link today to an article about how science may be putting an end to science fiction (see the article here). The basic premise of the article is that we’re at a time now, and have been for decades, where the pace of scientific discovery is going faster than science fiction authors can keep up. It’s great to think about Mars being full of wild aliens, that is right up until we send a probe there and figure out that the surface of Mars makes the Terran polar ice cap look exciting by comparison*.

I grew up reading Heinlein short stories, or rather I grew up being read Heinlein’s stories by my father, and as soon as I could I grabbed the books away from him and read them on my own. His stories are great because though they often have strange surroundings there is always something old-fashioned and comforting about the characters, I mean, they all love cats, what’s SciFi about that? But I knew as a kid that these stories were written in the 50s and actually most likely took place in the 1980s, which is the time I was reading them in, and it was clear that life did not resemble what Heinlein was writing about, nor would it any time soon. By his timeline there should’ve been multiple cities on the Moon, cheap solar power, and giant rolling conveyor belts that we used to travel between cities instead of cars. Sweet.

This wasn’t the only science fiction that I was reading; no I was consuming everything I could get my hands on. It was in the form of comic books, movies, TV shows, books, toys (lego’s especially), and even books on tape. Some of these were far from the realism of Heinlein, but all depicted a future where anything is possible. For a long time I thought that at midnight January 1^st in the year 2000 everything around me would physically change, buildings, cars, clothes, everything would suddenly become “futuristic” (for that I blame the Gobots, but that’s another story).

Somewhere along the way I became aware that I was living in someone else’s imagined future. Sure I believe in the predictive aspect of science fiction, but it is far more wrong than it is right, but that’s not what I mean. I knew that in 1948 someone imagined a certain (bleak) future in the far off year of 1984, and that future vision did not come to pass. This was very exciting to me as a kid. If it seemed real to have cities in space in 1952, then what might I see in my own time? In 1985 a trip to Mars by the year 2000 seemed very likely to my 9 year old mind, and it was something to get excited about. I was aware in my youth that I was not only living in someone else’s future, but also someone else’s past. Therefore, what bold future would find its humble beginnings in the 80s and 90s?

It is the sense of possibility and potential that makes science fiction important and relevant. The important thing about science fiction is the feeling that there are any possible number of futures ahead of us, and that we can explore them without having to live long enough to see them. This sounds overly hopeful, and I certainly view the future with hope, but also with a sense of hesitation. I’ve seen enough future histories not come true to know not to set my hopes too high.

But man, sometimes it’s too much fun not too!

*which I know is still pretty exciting from a certain point of view