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Science fiction stories deal with the future, and provide a glimpse of what that future may hold for us. A good science fiction story isn't about space, or space travel, or robots, or computers, or gadgets ... but about the way those things will have an impact on our society, or our day-to-day life. Here's an example. Consider where technology is today, right now, and think for a moment about where it may be thirty years from now. We are in the midst of a communications upheaval that has changed how we live our lives! We can now be in constant voice, video or text contact with anyone else, almost anywhere in the world, just about wherever we are. Everyone has a phone that also acts as a camera, allowing us to record ourselves in picture or video format, and send those files to anyone, anywhere, instantaneously. Information, about anything and everything, is available with a simple text query or command to Siri. Thirty years ago, we might have predicted all of this. Many did. Science fiction authors, however, would have written stories about people, and the fact that this pervasive techology was affecting how people socialize with others, how some people spend far more time staring at a phone screen and ignoring those around them, and how teaching and learning has made how to learn far more important than memorized information. Lots of predictions were made by people in the know about what these amazing devices in the future could do. Science fiction authors, however, would have written stories about how we use our thousand dollar phones to find amusing pictures of cats to send to friends. Now imagine where we'll be thirty years from now. What new technologies will exist? A 'futurist' will try to answer this. A science fiction author will write stories about day-to-day life and how those new technologies affect people. Here's an example that's almost upon us. Imagine a pair of glasses that you wear wherever you go. These glasses have a small, inconspicuous video lens built in to the frames, and contain a digital transmitter that uplinks with a satellite, sending your video stream to your home, where it is recorded. Everything you see during the course of a day gets sent to your home, minute by minute, as you go about your day. That's the science; the device. For a science fiction author, it's the basis for a story. But the story won't be about the device. The story will be about how our whole society changes as the result of its use! What effect will it have on crime and punishment? On how we interact with others? The genius of a good science fiction writer is in the way the consequences of a future technology impact peoples' lives. Anyone could have predicted television, back in the nineteen thirties. A science fiction writer would have written about the Home Shopping Network, and soap opera addiction! So what effect will our 'video glasses' have on society? Well, consider that most large American cities have a serious crime problem. What would thappen if every act of violence on a person was recorded by the victim, or a bystander? Every mugging, every assault, every murder, every rape ... captured on video and recorded remotely. We're almost there now. Maybe certain groups in society would take it upon themselves to be the video 'eyes' of the city, selling their video record of events (gathered while wandering around), to whomever had need of it. It would give new meaning to the TV six o'clock 'Eyewitness' news broadcast! This is happening now, with cell phones and dash cams, in places where laws pemit public recording. Ask yourself what effect this is already having on policing and race relations. People would pay extra to gather in places where video glasses weren't allowed, to indulge themselves in a little privacy. There's a story idea! A famous science fiction author and a personal favourite of mine is Larry Niven, whose future history stories and novels have won many many awards. He once wrote a story called 'Cloak of Anarchy' describing a park within a city where there were no laws except one: all acts of attempted violence carried the same penalty for attacker and victim; overhead police drones monitored the park, and would stun both attacker and victim, moving them to different parts of the park where they would wake up. Other than this, you could do whatever you wanted. Niven described the total anarchy that occurs when someone manages to disable all of the police drones at once. Another idea? The newest fad could be watching 24 hour videos taken by people in the course of their day. OK, we're there now! Did any science fiction writer predict 'Big Brother'? Think George Orwell and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'. Good science fiction doesn't even have to have any science in it, but will often be about the future, or in some cases, a loss of technology. My favourite example is the book 'Lord of the Flies', by William Golding. Hardly ever identified as science fiction, the fact that the story, familiar to most, is set in some fictional future where a group of boys, shipwrecked on a jungle island, face an uncertain future with none of the conveniences of modern life, and absolutely no modern technology, sets it squarely within the realm of good science fiction. Golding meant to show how, without civilization around them, people can very quickly revert to savagery and a loss of morals, which is a reflection of Thomas Hobbes' 'state of nature' theory. It is also a tenet of Niven's story mentioned above: that without the laws and technologies of civilization, people will quickly revert to depravity. However, there is another way to interpret this story, one that I believe is unique to me (or at least one which I've never read anywhere else), that makes its theme one that is often found in science fiction. The idea is that, when faced with the loss of civilization and modern technology, man is capable of reverting to a level of social behaviour that will ensure continued survival. In other words, the boys who adopted the primitive hunting tools and rituals were the ones who could have survived indefinitely. 'The strong survive, and the weak perish'. This is how aboriginal societies around the world thrive in harsh environments. The boys in Golding's hunting party, with their spears, camouflage, and courage-building rituals, are behaving exactly as aboriginals who survive in the densest rain forest jungles in many places on earth. It's a winning survival strategy. Saying this another way, there is no room for parliamentary procedure in the jungle, if you want to survive. Those boys would have died. This is a very common theme in science fiction: that humans can survive very primitive conditions if they can adapt themselves to hostile environments. Humans are good at this! Good science fiction doesn't need space ships or futuristic gadgets. If there is science involved, particularly medicine, it doesn't even have to be set in the future. I'm thinking of a famous short story by Daniel Keyes called 'Flowers for Algernon'. Algernon is a laboratory mouse who has undergone surgery to increase his intelligence. The story is told by a series of progress reports written by Charlie Gordon, the first human subject for the same surgery, and it touches on ethical and moral themes such as the treatment of the mentally disabled. Here is a synopsis of the story from Wikipedia: Charlie Gordon is a 37-year-old man with an IQ of 68 who works a menial job as a janitor at a factory. At his job, his main 'friends' are his co-workers Joe Carp and Frank Reilly, who frequently bully and mock him behind his back. Charlie attends a literacy program taught by Ms. Kinnian in hopes of improving his intelligence. He is selected to undergo an experimental surgical technique to increase his intelligence. The technique has already been tested on a number of nonhuman animals; the great success was with Algernon, a laboratory mouse. Although these events proved fruitful, the procedure’s full results were unknown. The surgery on Charlie is also a success, and his IQ triples. The original short story won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1960. You may have seen the 1968 movie adaptation 'Charly' starring Cliff Robertson, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. When we hear the term 'science fiction', we often think of movies like 'Star Wars'. Those movies are examples of very poor science fiction; basically just rehashed westerns with a space theme and really really bad science. Good science fiction is hard genre to write in. A western novelist, for example, can say something like "the cow hand pushed his way through the swinging doors of the saloon ..." and you have a complete mental picture of the setting and many of the characters, without the author having to do anything else to set the scene. A science fiction author, on the other hand, may have to desribe the characters, the setting, and the technology before even getting down to the story, and do it in a non-boring way that doesn't seem like exposition. Hopefully you can now see what good science fiction is all about. It isn't about the gadgets themselves. It's about people ... and how those people react to living in a society that has been changed somehow by that technology. Often for the worse. |