Why Science Fiction Rules the World (but not enough!!!)

March 11th, 2009

In many important ways, science fiction rules the world, but is regularly dismissed by the public at large.

I’m going to use an expansive definition of science fiction, as opposed to my usually more rigid definition that demands some adherence to science, and open this up to speculative fiction in general and nearly all novel, creative thinking that gets called “science fiction” by mainstream people.   I know some English professors who call Harry Potter science fiction, for instance.

All this stuff, all this “sf,” is considered weird to normal mainstream people, the mundanes.   Until it becomes popular or important, then the ignorant and arrogant bastards seize it as their own.

This is most obvious when it comes to movies.   Here’s one list from the 1980s that is totally dominated by sf movies, including Blade Runner, Aliens, The Terminator, The Empire Strikes Back, E.T., Back to the Future, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Princess Bride, etc., etc.   These films are spectacularly great and exploit the special effects of movies in a way that real life rarely demands.   A movie like Forrest Gump benefits from special effects, too, but sf thrives on it.

And people love it.   It makes sf accessible.

Because the truth of it is that we fans of science fiction have capabilities that the general public lacks, to enjoy novelty and think about difficult concepts.   To enjoy things that blow our minds, and seek that regularly.   The general public needs it dumbed down and shown to them in very clear terms.   To make it real.   And movie special effects make that easier to do.   Then everyone can enjoy it as mainstream entertainment and not consider themselves as weird novelty seekers, and then flock to sequels and just treat it as normal stuff.

Books don’t fare as well because they’re harder work.   Still, Stephen King and J. K. Rowling manage.   The science fiction not so much, falling into the cracks as it requires too much thinking usually in book form.

The public at large waits until science catches up before it worries about anything from the realm of science fiction.   Cloning was a scary fantasy, but not more, in movies and books, before the reality of Dolly the Sheep.   Then to make sense of this development for public policy they called in experts like…doctors and clergy?

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

The science fiction community had been talking about this for decades in serious ways and had a grasp of it better than even the people involved with the actual research.   I mean, the creator of Dolly thought that cloning humans was a bad idea because if a couple cloned the father, say, to have a child, the mother would then find the child sexually attractive when he grew up.   WTF???   Seriously, this was his position.

What I am trying to say is that the average person, the practical person, the people who live in the real world, are basically clueless when it comes to novelty and the things we think about and talk about on a daily basis, and somehow we get regularly excluded when the issues become relevant.

I’m trying to figure out why that is, and I think everyone is to blame.

It is part of our culture.   Something ridiculous is called “science fiction” until it become practical then it moves from our thing to their thing.   And we seem to let it happen too often.   To be fair, a lot of us prefer to look for the next interesting idea and refrain from getting involved with practical things.

There are figures from science fiction like David Brin, Larry Niven, Vernor Vinge, and Bruce Sterling who are viewed sometimes as more than “just” science fiction writers.   They have to be called futurists or something else to have legitimacy, it seems, even though it’s the same side of the same coin.

The thing is, Singularity or not, technology is moving forward rapidly and the possibilities are expanding.   Our politicians and pundits, our business leaders, ought to be well versed in science fiction and science fiction thinking, but if they are they hide it well.   Science fiction conventions are still covered on local TV news as a joke, a chance to laugh at the socially maladjusted people sitting in Denny’s in their costumes.

Anyway, science fiction rules the world in the popular culture of our films and in the technology that dominates our every day lives.   The world today is more fantastic in many ways than any sf writer imagined in the 1950s.   We have test tube babies and are on the verge of human cloning and designer babies.   We have portable devices that give us world-wide telephones, GPS, libraries of books and music, and the internet.   An individual can post a movie online that tens of millions of strangers then watch, just for fun.   One of the dominant issues of our era is global warming, and we worry about protecting ourselves from killer asteroids.   Science fiction stories about alien contact certainly can have something to teach us about interacting with alien human cultures, which seems to be a regular problem of great importance today.

My point here is that the people who need to know about this stuff don’t think about it much until it is already well past real.   Those of us who do think about this stuff tend to focus on the unreality as it is more interesting to us as novelty seekers, and we let ourselves be marginalized as weirdos.   Things have improved somewhat in recent years with some sf geeks coming out of the closet, so to speak, like Paul Allen of Microsoft and Newt Gingrich in congress, but too little.

Science fiction is important, practical, every day business.   Global environment and survival, the future of energy, the future of the human species and how we reproduce and alter ourselves, our technological devices and their effects on our culture, the clash of ancient tradition and the changing reality, these are the stomping grounds of science fiction.   Those of us into novelty and difference for the sake of difference have a lot to offer.   We have to find ways of communicating these ideas to those who think they live in the real, practical world, which isn’t the one they grew up inside.

How are we to do this?

Well, we have to be more confident and assertive in our identities.   We have to be polite but persistent, and dismissive of efforts to dismiss us.   We have to remind people of how the vision of science fiction is our present and near-future, from cell phones to computers to people’s babies.

It is amazing how people swallow this stuff and adopt it when it is on the big screen and the director has made it visual and easily assimilated.   We have to strive to do the same things when we talk with our friends and neighbors, our co-workers and politicians.   Egg-head and geek and nerd have to be empowering terms.   Everyone has to feel like they need one of us to talk with, or have resources to read or hear what we think about things.   And we have to be willing to do it.

A lot of us are elitist and just as dismissive.   We have to communicate dangers and possibilities of new concepts and not just discuss them amongst ourselves.   We have to make an effort and find ways of doing this.   Movies remain one possibility, but just as people dismiss ideas as “that’s science fiction” they also do so with film saying “it’s just a movie.”

More and more often these things are aspects of our modern reality that have no precendence in human history.   Somehow history gets respect and people say it “repeats itself” even though that is not true.   Science fiction isn’t exactly great at prediction, but the process is very useful for meeting the future with open eyes.

Anyway, I’d like to see suggestions for things we can do to open better communications and bring more people into the sf tent.   It’s healthy for a civilization to have its conservatives, but it isn’t healthy when such a large fraction of everyone can really be counted as conservatives in a fast-changing world.

Here’s my short list of tactics, starting with things that already work and getting more speculative: movies, TV shows, books (fiction and non-fiction), blogs, futurist activities (various foundations, conferences, reports, and more).   Seems too traditional and inadequate.   The rest of the world gets things from TV talk shows and news (who seem to take joke approaches and are cutting their science staff), churches, friends, popular magazines…how do we break in there?

How do we get a Vernor Vinge or Bruce Sterling sitting there next to Chuck Todd or Ben Stein on a political talk show?   Maybe it’s through the pundits who are already one of us, like Paul Krugman.   Maybe we can press writers like Bill Bryson into more sf-oriented work.   Hell, even just getting the Sci-Fi channel to stop making cheap crap movies that are dumb would help the cause — I’m not above some light escapism but it seems like giant-snake-of-the-week movie isn’t putting our best foot forward.

What is our best foot, and what high-tech materials do we build it out of?

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