I am watching the birth of a new reality; perhaps more accurately, I am participating in the creation of it. And every act of creation is a revelation, for the thing being created (if it is worth its mettle) always exceeds the vision of the creator. 

Since I was a youth, I have been an avid reader and fan of science fiction. There have been spurts of reading along the way, with periods of quiescence, though I have always stayed abreast of new science fiction movies as they were released. The last few years though (and especially the last few months), I have been into another reading surge; I have also been viewing a number of "classic" (often silent) older films that I had never seen. This accelerated absorption and consumption of material (of mental nourishment) is a big piece of the creative process going on within me. Creativity requires input. 

As a result of my life-long interest in science fiction, over roughly the last dozen years I have been evolving a slide presentation titled "Science Fiction: The Mythology of the Future" and have written a lengthy article on the topic, which appeared as the opening chapter in my book Contemporary Futurist Thought. Interestingly, of all my essays and book chapters on the Web, the science fiction article, by far, gets the most hits.

Based on the popularity of the science fiction article, Jeanne has been encouraging me to turn the article into a book and the presentation into a full-length college course. And in response, I have told her that to create the course and the book I will need to do a lot more reading, since as is true with almost everything, once you understand a topic well enough you realize how little you understand the topic. The amount of science fiction literature is immense, over-powering, and as deep and wide as the expanse of the universe, in space and time, that it covers within its multitudinous visions. 

But beginning this last fall, after a brief conversation with the science fiction writer, David Brin, on the idea of writing the book, I have been moving into high gear. I have been putting together a list of novels and short story collections that I need to read (a list that keeps growing), and I have started in on reading them, and, in conjunction, I have been creating the course with a detailed outline (expanding the two-hour presentation into a thirty-hour course), which will serve as the foundation for writing the book.  

Thus far it has been a trip--the act of creation is a "rush." For one thing, I have come to realize that science fiction as an evolutionary process within the history of human thought extends much farther back in time than I realized. Long before the publication of Frankenstein, frequently identified as the "beginning of science fiction," human minds were transversing the mindscape of all those themes and topics that we normally identify as science fiction. Of special note, the speculative depth, imaginative detail, and sheer quantity of writing, in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, far exceeds anything I had imagined. Kepler went to the moon in the early seventeenth century; we were visited by aliens from Sirius and Saturn in the speculative writings of Voltaire in the eighteenth century; we journeyed to the twenty-fifth century in the books of Mercier, also in the eighteenth century; and through the cosmic and spiritualist visions of Camille Flammarion we observed the biological transcendence of humans and the death of the sun, all this before the writings of H.G. Wells. 

Of additional significance, from a futurist and philosophical view, science fiction increasingly appears to me intertwined with the great intellectual and cultural movements of modern times (running back to the rise of science and modern astronomy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). The evolution of science fiction, furthermore, weaves together with the emergence of Western Enlightenment, philosophical and artistic Romanticism, Gothic literature, and evolutionary theory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the last century there are strong connections between science fiction and the two great World Wars, the space and nuclear arms race, the threat of the "bomb," the counter culture and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and the rise of computer technology, virtual reality, and cyberpunk. The growth of science fiction through the centuries says a great deal about the growth and transformation of the modern mind. 

As I have proposed, science fiction is the most visible and influential contemporary form of futurist thinking in the modern world. Science fiction is so popular because, in narrative form, it speaks to the whole person--intellect, imagination, emotion, and the senses; the cosmic, social, and personal; the natural and technological; the secular and the spiritual; and human values and modes of behavior--stimulating and enhancing holistic future consciousness. Indeed, science fiction, for many people in contemporary times, has become a total way of life--a way of experiencing reality.

Though we may associate the concept of myth with ideas derivative from the past, or stories of fantasy rather than truth, I have also proposed, as a centerpiece to my writings and teaching, that science fiction is the mythology of the future, providing dramatic narratives of the future that inform us and both frighten and inspire us. (I am presently in an ongoing debate with one of my students whether this description of science fiction is sufficiently expansive and articulate enough to cover all of science fiction.) 

Science fiction is not an escape from reality, but following Arthur C. Clarke, it is the most penetrating form of inquiry and exploration into reality. Science fiction expands and deepens our understanding of how humanity fits into the vast cosmic reaches of space and time; it illuminates the present as well as the future. Science fiction, similar to the great myths of the past, provides imaginatively rich scenarios and stories that excite, educate, empower, and enlighten us. Science fiction is not just about the future of science and technology; it is about the future of everything--indeed, it is about the possibility space of existence.

The course I am developing--this act of creation--as I construct and teach it this winter and spring, is intended to provide a comprehensive overview of the evolution of science fiction (there is no identifiable point in history when science fiction begins), covering in this evolutionary narrative its main themes, topics, and values. I am examining science fiction literature, film, art, pop culture, and fandom, and considering how science fiction has both influenced our visions of the future and been influenced by the ongoing evolution of modern society, science, and technology.

   

 

This last couple weeks I re-read two of the classics of modern science fiction (both of which I had read back in the 1970s), Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man and The Stars, My Destination. Bester was an electrifying and tumultuous fountain of language, inventiveness, and characterization. These novels zip along through murder, mayhem, obsession, and madness. Bester was also an astute psychologist, synthesizing issues of the human spirit with bizarre and colorful speculations on technology and human society in the future. Taken together, the books constitute a creative jump in narrative form and imagination, anticipating both the New Wave and Cyberpunk science fiction, reflecting the present and projecting human reality into the future. His ideas, his flow of consciousness, his psycho-techno reality has been swimming around in my mind; it is part of what is going into this new course, the surging, pulsating, bubbling act of creation I have (once again) been drawn into. (See also my Evolving List of Best Science Fiction Novels.)