Science Fiction and the Future

Abstract

FROM THE VERY BEGINNING of modern SF, enthusiasts, apparently unsatisfied with the mere popularity of the form, perceiving that at some level it does more than simply give pleasure, have asserted that SF serves an important educational purpose: by engaging us in the act of imagining the unknown (they tell us) SF prepares us for the future. William Rupp takes it as favorable sign that 48% of sampling of English professors defined SF as a type of story that . . . tries to anticipate the impact of future technological developments on society. Some recent guides to the future go so far as to insist that anyone who expects to cope with the future at all must read SF. Science fiction should be required reading for Future I, declares Alvin Toffler. Arthur C. Clarke maintains that A critical . . . reading of science fiction is essential training for anyone wishing to look more than ten years ahead.1 Though these futurologists refrain from claiming the kind of literal prophesy popular with SF apologists thirty years ago, they nevertheless agree with the earlier defenders in believing that SF trains its readers to anticipate the unexpected and helps them to encounter change and future that will certainly differ radically from the present. There is, to be sure, genuine intellectual pleasure to be derived from imagining in the fullest detail possible previously unknown or unthought-of machine, society, race, or environment, but this pleasure probably does not have the educational value that is claimed for it. Though SF often gives us sense of facing the unknown, its true insights are generally into the known, and its primary value lies not in its ability to train us for the future, but in its ability to engage particular set of problems to which science itself gives rise and which belong, not to the future, but to the present. At its core SF is powerfully conventional and deeply conservative-though not necessarily right wing-form of literature which, rather than assaulting the unknown by bold risks of the imagination, tames the threat of the future and in doing so articulates one aspect of our present human situation in way no other literary form can. In asserting that SF does not open up the future in the way its defenders wish it did, I may seem to be merely repeating what the debunkers of such literature have always claimed. The debunkers, of course, have not been entirely without truth. Where