In my youth I was a great fan of science fiction – and if you promise not to tell anybody I will confess that I even wrote some. But science fiction has gone downhill since those ancient days. There’s not much science in it now, not even imaginary science, and precious little about the future either. Fantasy has taken over. A typical story pits brave but puny human beings against mighty forces of evil. I know life sometimes feels like that on a Monday morning, but it's a thin literary diet. The slide from scientific optimism to magical fantasy in a mere half a century, is quite disturbing. Let’s hope it’s not a metaphor of our collective mental state.
Classic science fiction was exactly what the name implies – fiction about science and its possibilities. The central themes were optimistic – the triumph of knowledge and progress, the conquest of space, and even the end of mortality. Writers predicted many discoveries that actually happened – television, space travel, computers, and indeed radio, predicted in the 1880s by Jules Verne.
Authors like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov spun their plots around the question “What if…?” One of my own short stories, for example, featured an invention called the Panacticon, a sort of universal remote that could control not only the television, but the weather, the traffic, the growth of lawn grass, the children, the rate of rise of a soufflé, and just about everything except the behavior of cats. This device gave its owner god-like powers, but only so long as she remembered to change the batteries, which of course (in my story) she did not.
Science fiction always had a dark side, from H.G. Wells to J.G. Ballard. There were plenty of apocalyptic prophecies, and dystopias about the triumph of the machine. These are still very popular, especially in movies. Many young people obviously look forward to the apocalyptic end of the world, and enjoy the regular ultra-violent previews provided by Hollywood.
A big part of classic science fiction was the intergalactic adventure or space opera. But the real universe has been a bit of a disappointment so far. In the age of Captain Kirk and Luke Skywalker it was positively crowded, although the Hollywood version of outer space suggested that nobody out there, human or alien, had an ounce of common sense. Now we have had a chance to take a closer look at our universe, and it seems empty. But the hope is still there. Even finding a solitary paper clip on Mars would transform our vision of the universe.
An infinity of empty space must surely be populated. One day, I’m certain, we will be contacted by super-intelligent, super-civilized aliens who want to welcome us into the galactic community of advanced species. They will naturally choose to land in the American capital, which will immediately make them illegal aliens and, if and when they can find a parking space they will utter the traditional phrase which they have learned by studying our old TV shows: “Take us to your leader.”
Only a very talented science fiction writer could imagine what might happen next.
Copyright: David Bouchier
