the field has expanded enormously in scope so that today science fiction includes a much broader range of themes, ideas, and treatments.
Science fiction still deals heavily with future scenarios, and many science fiction stories have successfully predicted future events such as the atomic bomb, space travel, genetic engineering, the energy crisis, and the population explosion. Some scientists, such as Lewis Branscomb, vice president for research of IBM, credit science fiction with being the best way we have to predict the future.
Most science fiction writers, however, are not attempting to predict the future. They do not believe that there is a fixed and immutable future that can be predicted. Instead, their tales are forays into possible futures, potential tomorrows, always based on the intriguing question, “What would happen if...?” In a sense, science fiction writers are society’s scouts; they look ahead into all the myriad possibilities of tomorrow and offer a kaleidoscopic view of what the future may bring. As Alvin Tofler put it, reading science fiction is the antidote to “future shock.”
Writers who have never dealt with science fiction before are turning to it now, because it gives them the flexibility and the techniques to examine the future.
Lawrence Sanders, author of The Anderson Tapes, The First Deadly Sin and other blockbusters, also wrote in 1975 an out-and-out science fiction novel, The Tomorrow File, which deals with the impact of the new biological discoveries coming out of today’s research laboratories: Frankenstein in a punk rock costume. Doris Lessing’s recent works use alien creatures and societies to throw our own social world into sharper relief, and Robert Ludlum’s thrillers incorporate high-technology gadgetry and shadowy, menacing presences who secretly control the world— both staples of science fiction since the 1920s. Perhaps the trend toward absorbing high-tech gimmickry into novels of intrigue and adventure began with Ian Fleming’s adventures of superspy James Bond.
Kurt Vonnegut, of course, grew up in science fiction— and out of it. But he consistently uses science fiction writing techniques and ideas. In Slaughterhouse Five, for example, the juxtapositions of time, the concepts of “time tripping” and of benign alien intelligences who are studying the Earth, all came straight from the science fiction writer’s kit.
Len Deighton’s highly-successful SS:GB, on the other hand, is what science fictionists call an “alternate world” story. It takes place in a post-World War II Britain where the Nazis have won the war. That is a world that does not, and never will, exist. Yet it allows the author to create a setting that is at the same time familiar to the reader and yet strange; a setting in which the characters and the society created by the author can be examined and tested in ways that are impossible in an ordinary novel.
“People are fed up with their present world and looking for alternatives,” says Arthur C. Clarke. “This is not escapism... it can be scenario planning.” Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as the originator of the concept of communications satellites, sees science fiction as a way of examining the future.
It is also mind-expanding. Clarke’s 2001 asks a fundamental question: Who are we? Where does the human race fit in with the rest of the universe? In his classic short stories, such as “The Star” and “The Nine Billion Names of God,” Clarke again examines how technological marvels such as computers and spaceships can be used to search for the face of God.
Stanislaw Lem, the Polish dean of European science fiction, made that theme the basis for his novel, Solaris. In other stories, such as his series of tales of Pirx the space pilot, Lem uses futuristic settings to poke fun at rigid, bureaucratic governments. Russian science fiction writers also have mildly criticized their society in the same way. As one
Science fiction still deals heavily with future scenarios, and many science fiction stories have successfully predicted future events such as the atomic bomb, space travel, genetic engineering, the energy crisis, and the population explosion. Some scientists, such as Lewis Branscomb, vice president for research of IBM, credit science fiction with being the best way we have to predict the future.
Most science fiction writers, however, are not attempting to predict the future. They do not believe that there is a fixed and immutable future that can be predicted. Instead, their tales are forays into possible futures, potential tomorrows, always based on the intriguing question, “What would happen if...?” In a sense, science fiction writers are society’s scouts; they look ahead into all the myriad possibilities of tomorrow and offer a kaleidoscopic view of what the future may bring. As Alvin Tofler put it, reading science fiction is the antidote to “future shock.”
Writers who have never dealt with science fiction before are turning to it now, because it gives them the flexibility and the techniques to examine the future.
Lawrence Sanders, author of The Anderson Tapes, The First Deadly Sin and other blockbusters, also wrote in 1975 an out-and-out science fiction novel, The Tomorrow File, which deals with the impact of the new biological discoveries coming out of today’s research laboratories: Frankenstein in a punk rock costume. Doris Lessing’s recent works use alien creatures and societies to throw our own social world into sharper relief, and Robert Ludlum’s thrillers incorporate high-technology gadgetry and shadowy, menacing presences who secretly control the world— both staples of science fiction since the 1920s. Perhaps the trend toward absorbing high-tech gimmickry into novels of intrigue and adventure began with Ian Fleming’s adventures of superspy James Bond.
Kurt Vonnegut, of course, grew up in science fiction— and out of it. But he consistently uses science fiction writing techniques and ideas. In Slaughterhouse Five, for example, the juxtapositions of time, the concepts of “time tripping” and of benign alien intelligences who are studying the Earth, all came straight from the science fiction writer’s kit.
Len Deighton’s highly-successful SS:GB, on the other hand, is what science fictionists call an “alternate world” story. It takes place in a post-World War II Britain where the Nazis have won the war. That is a world that does not, and never will, exist. Yet it allows the author to create a setting that is at the same time familiar to the reader and yet strange; a setting in which the characters and the society created by the author can be examined and tested in ways that are impossible in an ordinary novel.
“People are fed up with their present world and looking for alternatives,” says Arthur C. Clarke. “This is not escapism... it can be scenario planning.” Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as the originator of the concept of communications satellites, sees science fiction as a way of examining the future.
It is also mind-expanding. Clarke’s 2001 asks a fundamental question: Who are we? Where does the human race fit in with the rest of the universe? In his classic short stories, such as “The Star” and “The Nine Billion Names of God,” Clarke again examines how technological marvels such as computers and spaceships can be used to search for the face of God.
Stanislaw Lem, the Polish dean of European science fiction, made that theme the basis for his novel, Solaris. In other stories, such as his series of tales of Pirx the space pilot, Lem uses futuristic settings to poke fun at rigid, bureaucratic governments. Russian science fiction writers also have mildly criticized their society in the same way. As one
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