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| humans built ships to travel to planets orbiting
other stars? None of this means that the things writers imagine
are going to happen. Many of them are likely to be impossible.
A good many are certainly impossible. We can all imagine things
which are impossible. Much SF is written in the form of short stories rather than as novels, though there are many novels as well. The best period of SF writing is often said to be from the 1940s until the mid 60s. This is because the early writers worked out many of the main themes of SF in an original and imaginative way. Many later writers tend to imitate the earlier writers, often in an unimaginative and rather mechanical way. Well-known writers in this genre are: Brian Aldiss, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, C.M.Kornbluth, Ursula le Guin, Doris Lessing, Walter M. Miller, Frederik Pohl, Keith Roberts, Robert Sheckley, Clifford D. Simak, John Wyndham (some of these writers have also written in other genres). Jules Verne and H.G.Wells are sometimes said to be the inventors of this genre. Some of the themes are: Space Travel Robots and Computers (a theme developed before computers became common in the 1980s) Nuclear War and the kind of world afterward Telepathy Different social systems Different forms of biological life Intelligence of animals The universe as a place of many kinds of life and intelligence Politics History (what if things had happened differently in the past) Time travel Alternative universes (suppose the laws of physics were different) Philosophy Ecology Some of these themes develop the ideas of scientists, especially physicists and biologists but also sociologists, philosophers, psychologists and political scientists. The best SF is a fiction of ideas, many of which are important to the development of |
modern society and technology. The worst SF is
like the worst of any kind of writing - a kind of drug to prevent
the mind thinking about anything. SF written until about 1960
tends to develop the ideas of "hard" scientists - physicists,
mathematicians and engineers; more recent SF tends to concentrate
on the biological and social sciences. This is probably a mirror
of the way real science has developed, so that at present the
most important problems are seen to be in the biological and
ecological areas. It has been suggested that SF writers have exercised their imaginations and helped the readers think about the kind of technological and social problems they will meet in life. Isaac Asimov in his stories about Robots developed in the 1950s many of the ideas about the effects of computers which we are now experiencing. Arthur C. Clarke claims he invented the communication satellite by proposing it in a story he wrote in the 1940s, at a time long before practical space travel was thought possible. Some writers think about the possible meeting of intelligent beings on other planets. Will humans ever find intelligent life in other parts of the universe? We can't tell, but if we do, the SF writers have prepared us to think about how to communicate with them. Some science fiction writers have used the form to discuss political, philosophical and social questions which cannot easily be discussed in a non-fiction form. For example, Pohl and Kornbluth (two writers who often collaborated) discuss, among other things, in The Space Merchants what society would be like if there were no restrictions on what advertisers could say about goods and no restrictions on what manufacturers could put into food and drugs. They imagine a world in the future in which the lies of advertisers are inescapable and the products they sell are harmful to consumers. This is of course our own world, a little exaggerated. In Gladiator at Law they discuss the concentration of political and economic power in large companies and the effects on the poor and powerless. In the United States of the late 1940s and early 1950s (the McCarthy period) anyone discussing such useful issues in a non-fiction form was in danger of being labelled a communist and losing his civil rights and ability to earn a living. In more recent times laws have been passed in industrial countries to control to some extent what advertisers are allowed to say and laws are now being passed to make consumer goods safer. Quite apart from periods of political intolerance, SF may be a good means |
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