Essays

by Gregory Benford

  The Stars My Destinations about strange people doing strange things, by themselves, somewhere up in the future and that's rather hard for some people to take. So I predict the big popular media breakthroughs in science fiction will probably always be a communal experience of the future in which you can identify with the group. This period in which we are seeing a whole bunch of these new ideas and great technical effects will last decades, but it will finally be over and there will be an era just as there was for the western when nobody wants to make this stuff any more. "Science fiction is over. Let's do some detective stuff." I would like to see our culture really get the true fix of science fiction and I don't know how to do that. I think to some extent it may depend on the audience insisting on something better than what we've been getting in the big sci fi movies. For those of you who like SF, and not sci-fi, what you need to do is proselytize about what is good but not getting through in modern science fiction.

  Science fiction has a lot to offer to the culture and particularly this current moment when our culture would have to think hot and heavy about the future because the rate of change is getting faster. Things are accelerating. We are entering a new era in which we truly have to become the stewards of the earth. The greenhouse warming and the ozone layer are just the beginning of large problems that we will confront. The big problems of the next century are going of those kind. And if we come out of it a century from now, it will be because we have finally realized that we have to actually manage the whole planet. Really we do. We can't just believe that if we make nice, everything will be okay. We are going to have to actually take voluntary control over the whole thing, because our abilities are now Promethean. And that is the big job of the next century and the only literature that can make this clear is science fiction and it going to be a tough message to get over, I am afraid.

  Haldeman: I am spinning a scenario of destruction where science fiction is the only tool with which to deal with the potentially devastating century that's to upon us. And real science fiction as a tool for thinking is literary. Every now and then there is a science fiction movie that requires a three digit IQ to understand but they are very uncommon and they aren't exciting the way that literary science fiction is. Yet people are becoming less and less literary. Even though they are not becoming less smart, there are usually non literary tools to deal with their problems. What happens if a hundred years from now or fifty or twenty, there are generations who literally cannot use literature as a tool. It's not that impossible. We've been talking about it in science fiction since the thirties - the post-Gutenberg generation. Somehow it hasn't happened yet and maybe it never will. It may be that we are hard wired for story telling and that generation will see science fiction as a modern or post-modern way of doing stories. I would hope so because I would hate to learn a new trade at this age but we shall see.