SF is Dead, Long Live SF

I set up a google news report for science fiction.  Usually it just contains articles from local newspapers about the latest hometown boy making it big – he just self-published his first SF novel!  And the local library has a copy!

Today was a little different.  Three different articles – here, here and here trashing science fiction as old hat, a dead genre, what was all that noise about anyway?

Even Cory Doctorow chimes in (although not in a negative way) with a reminder of just how old SF is and how far back into pre-history we have to dig in order to find something relevant for todays press.  In this case, Silverberg’s rehashing of the Cleve Cartmill/John Campbell/FBI/Philadelphia experiment conspiracy.  Apparently the only way to generate interest in science fiction these days is to obtain secret FBI documents by way of a FOIA request concerning a bunch of dead but famous science fiction authors.

Bruce Sterling and William Gibson chime in offering their rebuttals to the contention that the modern world has left science fiction behind; regional newspaper reporters extol the prognosticative misses of some of our best and brightest and seem to be arguing that since science fiction can’t accurately predict the future, we should dismiss it if not eliminate the genre entirely.

Point 1: SF is not about accurately predicting the future.  Its about entertainment.

Point 2: The people predicting SF’s demise and crowing over its inaccuracies aren’t reading (or remembering) the right stories.

I think that science fiction has been wonderfully accurate over the years, you just need to be looking in the right place.  Take Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons as a case in point.

Stupid people reproduce faster than smart people.  Marketing to and influencing stupid people is easier and less expensive than doing the same with the intelligentsia.  A profitable world economy requires population growth…

Apply Darwinian principles to these conditions and you’ll quickly arrive at Kornbluth’s dystopian future, one that horribly reflects and accurately portrays our own. 

Or what about the presentation of a rabidly corporate world presented by Pohl and Kornbluth in The Space Merchants?

Advertising and marketing drives everything.  The corporation is the state and the state is the corporation.  School children are indoctrinated during their most vulnerable years through exposure to advertising disguised as education.  Companies operate their own schools, hospitals, housing programs, welfare and even have their own armies. (Blackwater anyone?)

If you want more, pick up John Brunner’s dystopian trilogy The Sheep Look Up, Stand on Zanzibar and The Jagged Orbit.  Global warming, overpopulation, corporate greed, ecological nightmares of every kind, uncontrollable and drug resistant diseases…

Or even Del Rey’s The Eleventh Commandment that portrayed a world controlled by fundamentalist religions and collapsing under the burden of over-population. 

Science Fiction WAS wonderfully accurate about the future we’re currently living in.  You can easily find more such by picking up just about any 50s or 60s era dystopian story you care to mention.  The problem isn’t SF’s failure to predict accurately, its reality’s failure to have lived up to the utopian ideals presented by the other half of the genre. 

We’re not living on the Moon, flying around in jet packs or enjoying free energy because we gave up on the ideal of striving for utopia and settled for selling Soylent Green to Morons instead…

Opening Remarks

I’ve been a science fiction fan since at least 1963.  That year saw the original airing of Fireball XL5a super-marionation SF kids show. 

In trying to date my history as a fan, Fireball is the first thing with science fiction elements I can put a solid chronological marker on.  I know I was exposed to other science fiction elements before ‘63, but these are vague memories of indeterminate date.

Considering that I watched every single episode (more than once), Fireball is as good a place to start as any.

Forty five plus years later I’m still a fan.  In recent years I’ve begun expressing my interest through a website devoted to a favorite author and my pulp magazine collection.

 As time goes by I’ll be commenting on various things related to science fiction here.  For the time being, I’m going to be posting some images from my website and maybe saying a thing or two about those images.

To start, I offer this:

Science Fiction was first published in 1939 by Columbia.  It enjoyed a relatively long run although not a continuous one.  It was merged with Future Fiction, reissued under its own name on two separate occasions and eventually ended up as The Original Science Fiction Stories, which eventually folded in 1960.  The magazine was edited by Charles D. Hornig and this first cover was created by the inestimable Frank R. Paul. 

The background image is from the Spitzer Space Telescope and is a composite of a stellar nursery named DR21 in the constellation Cygnus.  DR21 is home to one of the most massive new stars ever seen, one that is more than 100,000 times brighter than Sol.

More images combining NASA space telescope images (Hubble and Spitzer) and science fiction and fantasy magazines can be seen on my site Rimworlds.  (If you just want to see the pretty pictures, go here.  Otherwise, select the Gallery link when you get to the front page.)  The majority of that site is devoted to the Rimworlds Concordance Project chronicling the Rim Worlds stories of science fiction author A. Bertram Chandler.