April 13 2008

One way to get noticed by the media seems to be to pronounce the end of something. About twenty years ago, a book titled The End Of Ideology received much attention. The premise of this book was that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the perceived triumph of Capitalism, future elections would no longer reflect competing political visions. They would simply be about who could provide the best management.  We all know how well that worked out.

Shortly after the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001, someone said that irony was dead. No explanation was offered about what irony had to do with 9/11, but it doesn't matter. The last time I checked, irony was alive and well, thank you very much.

Now, it has become chic to announce the end of science fiction as a literary form. The argument seems to be that real science has overtaken science fiction and advances come so quickly now that fiction writers are unable to stay ahead of the curve. Their stories become outdated the moment they are written.  Such thinking reminds me of the American congressman who argued, back in 1898, that the United States Patent Office should be closed down because everything of importance had been invented already.  He may have been a bit premature.

Science fiction always tells us more about the period in which it was written than it does about the future. The 1930s had an abundance of wonder gadget stories and the 1950s gave us tales of atomic cars moving around in domed cities because such ideas caught the imagination of the people living in those eras. The Twentieth Century was dominated by the use of physics to produce such advances as aviation and telecommunications, along with nightmares like nuclear weapons.  Our current century will be driven by biology.

Humanity is on the threshold of creating artificial organs, regenerating severed limbs and even creating life in the laboratory from inanimate matter. These advances and others like them will provide more than enough social changes and ethical issues to keep science fiction writers busy for years to come.  To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of SF have been greatly exaggerated.

Do you agree or do you think that science fiction has come to the end of the road?  I'd like to know your opinion.

George

P.S. Visit my website at www.checkmatefiction.com for some free short stories.