SCIENCE FICTIONAL LIVING
By Jack Womack
Jack Womack has written several books, most notably Random Acts Of Senseless Violence.
In the old days, the term science fiction (and here I mean only written English-language science fiction, which has until lately tended to hold sway over how the genre is perceived throughout much of the world) allowed for a wider range of carryings-on beyond those found in the scientific romances of H. G. Wells—there were books where utopias would be found in the form of a gigantic department store, or where dystopias would be presented as places where women wore pants and had the vote, or where lost civilizations had been preserved deep with the earth, or atop mesas in the Andes, and much more. During the 1920s and 1930s, however, the pulp magazine editors of the 1930s who fell into becoming the gatekeepers of science fiction, and later the studio bosses, set the parameters of what was permissible and what was not in order to make believable, i.e. salable, science fiction. In due course everyone agreed upon the basics; that is, 1) Science should nominally be the main character; 2) other characters should be white, male, sexist, possibly xenophobic, and at all times devoid of an inner life (granted, these often seemed to be requirements in much other midcentury fiction); and 3) Science is in practice not necessary to make good science fiction.
Science fiction as it had been known, a sort of pastime for all ages, became something else the moment Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon. After ten years of constant attention to the race to the moon, no sooner was it reached than the public made their lack of interest in space, as it was, clear. Instead of the mundane pleasures offered by Skylab, the public turned their attention to the kind of Space they always preferred, the kind where outfits were always impractical, air always easy to find, and where spaceships still made whooshing sounds in a vacuum. And there was much fun to be had with Star Wars and Star Trek, as the unconscious feel that perhaps the earth was offering less and less, seemed to take hold. As the eighties continued on, offering Aliens on the one hand, Blade Runner with another, it was seeming more and more that science fiction was in essence an area in which lay a limitless number of diversified marketing opportunities. There could be no shortage of possibilities in that most frightening of alien worlds, the Media world.
Until, after unending warnings prior to the reality finally beginning to sink in, there was.
The science that is no longer science fiction surrounds us now. There are only so many ways to say that at present we will soon enough be watching our own extinction and while science fiction has suggested this many times in the past, it offers no immediate solutions about what to do when it is actually occurring. Our leaders here and abroad may yet drive us into finality, as if one is trying to outrace the other; as if the certainty of one drives the ones in charge to make it so. Science fiction, as it exists, gives us the imagination and the hope that some of our descendants will be here to see it. That no longer seems a given. There will definitely be a 22nd century, although no one reading this can guess who’ll be here to see it in.
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