Boys' Mere Fancy.
Your Humble Narrator decided a while back that the common and disparate elements that make up the science fiction genre are, appropriately enough, of an alien enough composition and arrangement to defy conventional wisdom and the natural human tendency to pigeonhole, label, and define. Like other elemental intangibles like love or enlightenment or happiness, science fiction may very well suffer through centuries of criticism, analysis, deconstruction, translation, and reinvention in an attempt to coalesce its core meanings and values; but will also most probably only prove itself as resilient and slippery a subject to crack open as any others examined and reviled by poets, scientists, and vicars alike.
Science fiction is the sprout of an overactive imagination, of a sight beyond sight, of minds that see a thousand different things where you and I only see a handful. Bemoaning the death of science fiction is like bemoaning the death of jazz; these are both things whose downfall and demise seem perpetually imminent, but never reach a conclusive resolution. The day that there is a clear, unambiguous, black-and-white definition of science fiction is the day sci-fi is put into the ground for good.
It's so difficult to crystallize science fiction because it is not a pure genre; it's a portmanteau, a conglomeration, a mutt. Science fiction is an ill-supplied generation ship, making its way along a hastily-plotted course, losing bits and pieces here and picking up supplements and add-ons there. Science fiction is schizophrenic and obsessive-compulsive and codependent, it makes its own rules and then flaunts them, it's irrational and materialistic and very, very, silly.
Science fiction is fantasy in everything but name, but also, true to form, in name as well. After all, what is, for example, a ride to the moon but a purely fantastic notion? The only thing that seems to separate the flavor of such a journey, science fiction or fantasy, are the machinations employed to arrive at the destination ultimately. If it's a giant hollow bullet shot from a space gun, or an orbital elevator, or a dematerialization machine, it's a fair case for science fiction. But what if we're carried away on the neck of a giant steam-filled duck, or we dare to penetrate the ether of space on silk wings hot-glued to our shoulder blades, or maybe simply bilocate using the psychocreative powers of an evolutionarily accelerated mind; what's that, then?
Either way, we get to go to the Moon.
Related: The War On Science Fiction.
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Science fiction is the sprout of an overactive imagination, of a sight beyond sight, of minds that see a thousand different things where you and I only see a handful. Bemoaning the death of science fiction is like bemoaning the death of jazz; these are both things whose downfall and demise seem perpetually imminent, but never reach a conclusive resolution. The day that there is a clear, unambiguous, black-and-white definition of science fiction is the day sci-fi is put into the ground for good.
It's so difficult to crystallize science fiction because it is not a pure genre; it's a portmanteau, a conglomeration, a mutt. Science fiction is an ill-supplied generation ship, making its way along a hastily-plotted course, losing bits and pieces here and picking up supplements and add-ons there. Science fiction is schizophrenic and obsessive-compulsive and codependent, it makes its own rules and then flaunts them, it's irrational and materialistic and very, very, silly.
Science fiction is fantasy in everything but name, but also, true to form, in name as well. After all, what is, for example, a ride to the moon but a purely fantastic notion? The only thing that seems to separate the flavor of such a journey, science fiction or fantasy, are the machinations employed to arrive at the destination ultimately. If it's a giant hollow bullet shot from a space gun, or an orbital elevator, or a dematerialization machine, it's a fair case for science fiction. But what if we're carried away on the neck of a giant steam-filled duck, or we dare to penetrate the ether of space on silk wings hot-glued to our shoulder blades, or maybe simply bilocate using the psychocreative powers of an evolutionarily accelerated mind; what's that, then?
Either way, we get to go to the Moon.
Related: The War On Science Fiction.
⎋