Thursday, March 24, 2005

Is Science Fiction Dying?

Norm Spinrad thinks so. Here is an article about it on See The Forest.

I hope he is wrong. I have read science fiction since discovering "Cosmic Engineers" (by Clifford D. Simak) in a library in Huntington Park, CA when I was eleven. That genre formed a lot of my worldview, and my experience is that the better engineers I knew all grew up reading science fiction.

But science fiction is forward looking, postulating worlds that have never been but might someday be. Conservatism is, by definition, backwards looking. Conservatism sees society today as degenerate, is afraid of tomorrow and is trying to return to some utopia that may have existed in the past. Camelot is a very conservative story of a society in decline. I don't think that science fiction can exist as a commercially viable literary genre in a truly conservative society.

Is the science fiction literary genre another canary in the American coal mine?

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