Why SF Speaks to All of Us…

[wingsmith]

Originally published at Tom Pollock. Please leave any comments there.

…was the title of a rather splen­did dis­cus­sion panel, hosted by the British Library, to help launch their sci-fi exhi­bi­tion ‘Out of this World’.

The pan­el­lists were: Erik Davis, China Mieville, Adam Roberts and Tri­cia Sul­li­van. Lumi­nar­ies all.




(Very) edited high­lights included the fol­low­ing ideas:

Adam say­ing that SF hit a water­shed moment with the release of Star Wars, which marked the begin­ning of SF’s tran­si­tion into the main­stream, but also began a shift of it’s key iden­ti­fy­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic: from being a lit­er­a­ture of ideas,  to being a vehi­cle for visual spectacle.

Erik’s rejoin­der to the above - that the con­tent of Sci­ence (as with all fic­tion) exists as a rela­tional prop­erty with the reader, and you never know what’s going on in people’s heads. Even the cheesi­est ‘explod­ing space­ship’ SF  can pro­voke inter­est­ing ideas in it’s audience.

China point­ing out a major flag of the ‘main­stream­ing of SF’  was meta-indicators. He men­tioned that not only the con­cep­tual fur­ni­ture of SF, but the fur­ni­ture of SF Fan­dom (Like Comic­Con), was mak­ing its way into the plots of main­stream shows like Psych (‘Shawn vs The Red Phan­tom’, S1 Ep 8). Even the pro­lif­er­a­tion of SF tropes is becom­ing a trope, that’s how far along we are.

Tri­cia latch­ing onto the idea of the SFing of the main­stream, and a ques­tion from the audi­ence about why SF is seen as some­thing ado­les­cents are into, and mak­ing the fol­low­ing point: We live in ado­les­cent times, the future feels full of both poten­tial and risk. At such times, maybe more peo­ple embrace s SF because the’unfolding of the new’ that occurs in it, res­onates with them more.

Which is an inter­est­ing point. I’ve felt for a while that the bil­dungsro­man ‘emer­gence into a new uni­verse’ char­ac­ter of a lot of SFF was a good fit for the ado­les­cent expe­ri­ence.  But my gut says the cur­rent boom in accep­tance has less to do with cul­tural insta­bil­ity, and more to do with the fact the people’s lives aren’t as pre­des­tined as they used to be. Jobs for life are pretty well a myth, peo­ple encounter more and more oppor­tu­ni­ties to rein­vent them­selves at later and later stages of their lives now, and maybe SF is what they want to be read­ing while they’re doing it.

What do you guys think?

Best ques­tion of the day, from a guy in the audi­ence: ‘If SF speaks to every­one, why did my girl­friend make me come here alone?’

Best intra-panel show­down: China vs Tri­cia and Adam on the sins of Michael Bay’s Trans­form­ers. In the words of my esteemed girl­friend ‘Big Stompy Robots, HA HA HA!’