Is Science Fiction Bad For Us

IS SCIENCE FICTION BAD FOR US? This article was initially guest-posted on the now defunct blog Grasping for the Wind in December of 2010. As I promised a number of weeks ago, I’ll resurrect a number of of these dozen or so posts, relying on how they’ve aged. And this one will show its age in a few methods, however I assume the general level continues to be legitimate, and worthy of consideration… For years nowâ€"decades evenâ€"there has been an argument in play in political circles on this nation that violent motion in films, tv, and especially now in video games has a desensitizing impact on kids. The “logic” is that if kids “witness” hundreds of murders earlier than, say, their eighteenth birthday, they grow as much as be violent adults, having been taught by the media that not only is there nothing wrong (scary, distasteful, and even unlawful) about violence, but that appearing out violently makes you cool. Or something like that. I imagine by now you’ve sorted out from my use of quotes how I re ally feel about this submit hoc ergo propter hoc argument when it comes to violent conduct stemming directly from violent fictional content material. If you haven’t figured it out from the quotes, I’ll simply say it: I suppose it’s crap. But then something else simply occurred. On December 2 (2010), astronomers announced that there are literally 3 times as many stars within the universe as we thought there have been. That identical day, NASA confirmed (then later walked again) that that they had found arsenic-based mostly life in Mono Lake, California, which seemed to point the presence of a terrestrial shadow biosphere. That day I was all aflutter with these two news objects, popping out and in of my SF-writer/fan-heavy corner of the Twitterverse, which was equally aflutter… however then I rejoined the mainstream world. I’ll guess you real money a nationwide ballot would inform you that more Americans know the name of the porn star who rode out Charlie Sheen’s newest dr ug-fueled tantrum (that pegs it on the popular culture timeline, doesn’t it) than had even heard of either of these events, a lot less exhibit the only understanding of their implications. Why is that? I’ll admit that the larger implications of a attainable second biosphere on Earth (and a microbial one at that), a lot much less the number of red dwarves within the universe could be esoteric at best. But the relative weight of the day’s “information” made me cease and take into consideration why scientific developments so rarely capture the eye of the media, which is ostensibly making selections on what to cover based on what their customers have advised them they wish to hear about. I did somewhat Googling (again, 9 and a half years ago), and that is what I found: A seek for “Mono Lake arsenic life” yielded 243,000 Google outcomes, while the time period “Charlie Sheen porn star” gave again 341,000 results. Vagaries in Google’s metrics aside, that seems to point that there are ninety eight,000 more web pages that point out “Charlie Sheen” and “porn star” in the identical breath than point out “Mono Lake” and “arsenic life.” But again, the implications of the Mono Lake find are somewhat on the obscure facet, so what if we just went with personalities? On a lark I figured I’d Google essentially the most famous (then) living scientist I know of, Stephen Hawking, and came up with a heartening four,730,000 results, which made me actually excited once I discovered that, sans “porn star,” Charlie Sheen netted only three,700,000 outcomes, which I insist means that Stephen Hawking is extra well-known than Charlie Sheen. A win for science! Until, that's, I typed in the name Paris Hilton and was knocked on my fake Gucci handbag by her whopping fifty one,500,000 Google search outcomes. Granted, that information is probably most annoying to Charlie Sheen, but I would love it to be disturbing to everyone. At the same time NASA was t elling us about tons more stars and critters we didn’t know we’ve been sharing our planet with, I’ve been reading more science fiction, together with the Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle traditional The Mote in God’s Eye, in addition to a little science: The Eerie Silence by Paul Davies, both of which I’ve written about at Fantasy Author’s Handbook. Something made me ask: Is all this science fiction’s fault? If violent video video games desensitize people to violence, does science fiction desensitize people to science? Let’s face it, there’s nothing in regards to the first inklings of the potential of a terrestrial shadow biosphere that’s as entertaining because the extraterrestrial car/robots of Transformers, the cantina scene in Star Wars, even the remake of V, or any of the other hundreds and thousands of depictions of extraterrestrials science fiction has provided us. And a couple of extra stars, even a number of planets orbiting them? Big deal. The crew of the Enterprise went to a new planet every week or so. I couldn’t assist getting the sensation that the overwhelming majority of the public greets science reporting with a cynical grunt and, “Yeah, let me know when it’s about to grab my face and lay an egg in my stomach.” Until then, it’s simply not interesting. And that goes double for technology. I’m enough of a full on geek that my new 4G good phone blows my freakin’ thoughts. I feel as if I’m residing the science fiction novels I learn as a child in the seventies. But plainly nearly everybody else simply shrugs these items off, like, “Sure, my phone can inform me the place I am on Earthâ€"anywhere I am on Earthâ€"on the flick of a contact display screen. Why couldn’t it?” In truth, it’s gotten to be a type of interest, people criticizing science fiction for all of the times they received the longer term mistaken. In his article “Space Colonization in Three Histories of the Future,” John Hickman wrote: Retr ospective story telling is enticing not only due to the overlap in the audiences for well-liked science and onerous science fiction but additionally it lends a measure of pleasing inevitability to the promise of area colonization. For writers intent on sneaking past the messy issues of financing and populating their future area colony, there is nothing fairly so effective because the sense of inevitability for giving readers permission to have interaction in wishful thinking. Crucial to the perpetration of this literary deception is analogy to some incorrectly conceived historic episode of frontier opening on Earth. I interpret this to mean that SF is fun, however just about entirely with out basis and outcomes only in some pointless thought-experiments, setting apart the fact that he’s lacking the purpose of what science fiction truly is, which is a means of commenting on the current by extrapolating into the future and solely in probably the most naive instances is it actually m eant to postulate some future reality. But Hickman’s criticisms continue by focusing on the 2008 Robert Zubrin guide: How to Live on Mars is loosely modeled on the handfuls of guidebooks printed for prospective emigrants to the mid-nineteenth century interior American West. The maybe unintentional irony is that it shares some of their worst flaws. Typically the products of journalistic creativeness rather than direct experience on the frontier, those old guidebooks usually promoted the financial interests of specific railroad lines and explicit cities. From this we’re led to believe that at least considered one of SF’s sacred cows (that space colonization is akin to the colonization of North America) is completely baseless, or at least primarily based on a convenient/populist mis-learn of historical past. In other phrases, if we press out into area with that in mind, we’re doomed to repeat our forefathers’ worst mistakes. There are science fiction novels and flicks, togeth er with the ham-fisted Avatar, that truly acknowledge this potential, that we would spread the worst of our mercantile and environmental sins into a galaxy of innocent aborigines. The colonization of the moon for the purpose of mining helium-three is another trope that Hickman tore down: Beyond the optimistic projections that… fusion reactor know-how will turn into a sensible method to generate electricity, there are two other obvious wrinkles in the tissue of expectation. I’m leaving off what these two insurmountable obstacles to moon colonization may be, principally as a result of he’s typically appropriate, however I like that line: “wrinkles in the tissue of expectation.” See? Science fiction offers us unhealthy expectations of a utopian future. If you’re willing to consider that violent video games trigger actual violence, it’s at least as easy to see that futurist predictions that don’t come true cause cynical reactions against the would-be prognosticators who made them, although specific technological predication is rarely the SF author’s purpose. In “15 Predictions About the Future That Failed Miserably,” (an article I can now not find…) Stephen Kral began out with: If you watched movies or TV shows in any respect within the final fifty or so years, then you’ve seen nearly every thing the long run has in store for us. You’ve seen us conquer aliens, you’ve seen machines conquer us, and you’ve seen loopy batshit technology doing loopy batshit issues. The solely kicker is that you never got to see these things in real life. Which, typically, can be an excellent factor (Alien invasions? No thanks), however then there’s the stuff that we might need and that we're still waiting for (flying automobiles anyone?). Here are a few of these cases. That is, probably the most noteworthy cases in which the future predictions of tv and cinema, failed us miserably… The article then went on to bemoan the absence of all of the horrible things that didn’t happen, together with Terminator’s nuclear apocalypse, 1984’s, nicely, Orwellian totalitarian oligarchy (which has come true, by the best way), or Red Dawn’s ridiculous invasion of the United States by USSR-supported Nicaragua and Cuba. Really? You’re mad as a result of no one ever truly constructed Skynet, and Skynet didn’t truly become self conscious in both 1997 or 2004, and didn’t really attempt to kill us all with nuclear weapons and unstoppable robotic assassins? Sorry, and yeah, James Cameron is a big fats liar. This enterprise was turned upside down, thankfully, in Sarah Kessler’s article “11 Astounding Sci-Fi Predictions That Came True” by which she factors out that SF authors have indeed gotten it right typically, and have predicted everything from the iPad (described in spooky element in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odysseyâ€"and you can see a moon astronaut using one in the film) to Hugo Gernsback’s 1911 description, in “ Ralph 124C 41+,” of a device that operates completely like RADAR, which was not actually realized till 1933. And in my suggestion of Paul Davies’s The Eerie Silence I threw myself on the toes of scientists who were inspired, like Davies, right into a career in science by the use of the SF they have been exposed to as kids. Okay, so tripling the number of stars and doubling the variety of biospheres isn’t as viscerally entertaining as that opening space battle in Star Wars Episode III, and I guess I’m within the minority in being extra caught up in the idea of setting out from the Gateway asteroid on a mysterious journey to the farthest reaches of area than I am in imagining being trapped in the bathroom whereas Charlie Sheen trashes a lodge room. But in the same means that actual crime statistics argue the direct reverse of the violent video games equals violent youngsters argument, there may be an argument towards the identical post hoc ergo propter hoc argument that scienc e fiction creates scientific ambivalence. Damien G. Walter wrote in his article for the Guardian, “Stranger Than Science Fiction”: “…throughout human history, from Homer to Milton and beyond, the type of fiction most trusted to the touch the reality was not realism however fantasy and fable. It appears the permeability of the barrier between fiction and actuality is nothing new, at least to writers. And the fact that Grand Theft Auto was most popular throughout one of many least violent durations in recorded historical past and a movement was organized around the opposite assumption, would possibly simply imply that I ought to return to pondering SF is sweet for us, as a result of in spite of everything, Avatar was released smack dab in the midst of a scientific and technological golden age unparalleled in all of human history, and nobody seems to provide a crap. Except science fiction fans. â€"Philip Athans Follow me on Twitter @PhilAthans… Link up with me on LinkedIn… Friend me on GoodReads… Or contact me for modifying, coaching, ghostwriting, and extra at Athans & Associates Creative Consulting. About Philip Athans As a science fiction creator, you need to strike a balance between science and fiction. It is necessary for these two things to be correctly weaved collectively when writing a science fiction story. Do not bombard your story with so many details. Sheesh. I’m an enormous believer that there’s plenty of fantasy to be found on Earth, in fable and history and day-to-day living. I can consider that sci-fi can be just the identical. One has to open their eyes to the marvels of science, simply as they might to the whimsy of fantasy. Fill in your particulars under or click an icon to log in: