Was the national anthem your first dance at your wedding? Does it flow red, white and blue when you nick your skin shaving?
Score: 90% (18 out of 20)
I’m overwhelmed with the urge to share a dark, dirty literary secret: that I not only read science fiction, I love it, I learn from it — and I think you should too.
This isn’t because the genre is producing great literature. For the most part, it isn’t. A lot of the best known science fiction looks either dated (Jules Verne, HG Wells) or dumb: the platitudinous and banal ‘philosophical’ discussions of the Star Trek crew on their pointless and endless galactic cruise. Or take (please!) the movie Avatar, a lot of science fiction is about flashy special effects grafted onto silly politics and creaky plots.
Nor should you read science fiction to find out where technology is going.
Science fiction is perhaps best understood by an alternative name for the genre: speculative fiction. It is fiction that asks questions about the human condition and the meaning of life by taking us beyond everyday life. We go to strange planets, far distant futures or even to our own past — in order to learn about who we really are.
Taken as a whole, the field of science fiction today is where most of the most interesting thought about human society can be found. At a time when many academics have become almost willfully obscure, political science is increasingly dominated by arcane and uninspiring theories and in which a fog of political correctness makes some forms of (badly needed) debate and exploration off limits, science fiction has stepped forward to fill the gap.
The biggest single task facing the United States today is the unleashing of our social imagination. We are locked into twentieth century institutions and twentieth century habits of mind. Science fiction is the literary genre (OK, true, sometimes a subliterary genre) where the social imagination is being cultivated and developed. Young people should read this genre to help open their minds to the extraordinary possibilities that lie before us; we geezers should read it for the same reason. The job of our times is to build a radically new world; speculative fiction helps point the way.
