inkbluesky

As Bryan Appleyard notes in this article science fiction is too important to ignore, Why don’t we love science fiction?

“In a fantasy story,” Aldiss says, “there’s a big evil abroad, but, in the end, everything goes back to normal and everybody goes home to drink ale in the shires. In a science-fiction story, there may be a terrible evil abroad, and it may get sorted out, but the world is f***ed up for ever. This is realism. It’s certainly not beach reading, unless you can find a really nasty, shingly beach.”

The big problem with being sniffy about SF is that it’s just too important to ignore. After all, what kind of fool would refuse to be seen reading Borges’s Labyrinths, Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco, Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World or Wells’s War of the Worlds just because they were SF? These are just good books, irrespective of genre. But they are also books that embody the big ideas of the time – both Wells and Lem were obsessed with human insignificance in the face of the immense otherness of the universe, Huxley with technology as a seductive destroyer and Orwell with our capacity for authoritarian evil. Borges, like Lem, suspects we know nothing of ourselves. Interested in these things? Of course you are. Read SF.

Appleyard thinks its the British who are still snobs about literary, though not film science fiction. Just casual observation, but it seems like we’ve rounded that corner in the U.S. with writers like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick being thought of as among our best writers. What they might lack in literary nuance they well make up for with insights into the possibilities of the future. For those that like to keep tract of such things Brian Aldiss points out that Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein was the first science fiction novel. The concerns she expressed about our technology getting ahead of our wisdom to use it are still pertinent, like our present day fears about human cloning.

cathedral and snow 

Where did the college kegger begin. We can thank or blame America’s first fraternity Phi Beta Kappa, started at Thomas Jefferson’s alma mater in 1776.