Thoughts around Science Fiction

If you for some reason happen to follow me on Twitter you might have noticed that I have been to a seminar on Science Fiction (SF), actually there has been two of them. I have to say that they have been quite interesting, mostly because I really enjoy SF and try to at least see as many films as possible in the genre and also read books from the genre that I hear are good. But my interest for SF is not really what has made these seminars interesting, even though it probably has helped, instead it is the discussion about SF from a broader perspective like what can SF teach us about us that made these seminars interesting.

The seminars was of course given during my course 'information retrieval and new new media' but the speaker was a guest speaker on the course called Michael Godhe. The link is for the a Swedish university site, Godhe works for Linköpings Universitet (or University of Linköping, also called LiU). It tells us that Godhe got a bachelor's in History of Ideas at the University of Uppsala in 1997 and a doctorate in Technology and Social Change at LiU in 2003. His works has centred around SF and popular science, culture and media. Of course the site says a lot more about Godhe but that's at least a quick review of where he comes from as a speaker on the subject of SF. Here is also a couple of links to first a video of an interview he did for Utbildnings Radion and for his thesis. Both are unfortunately in Swedish.

During the first seminar we tried to cover the definition of what SF is, something that lead Godhe to ditch his lecture notes and just dive into the debate. We had several very good ones and essentially we boiled it down to what Godhe had as a definition from the beginning.



"Where the past, the present and the future meets is where science fiction lives". It might not be exactly what Godhe said but that's pretty much what it comes down too. What this means is that science fiction usually takes a problem that we currently have and with the help of the past, the present and the future it puts that problem in the future and either gives us a solution to the problem with the help of science and or technology or it paints us a picture of how the future will be if we do not do something about the present or solve issues from the past. As an example, today we have a bit of a environmental problem (whether you agree with it or not it is at least spoke about quite a lot) so today we see films like 'The Day After Tomorrow' as an example of what will happen in the future if we do not deal with today's problem. A couple of decades ago there was a scare about the surveillance society and so we had films like 'Brazil' show up. Go back an other 40 years and we get back to when George Orwell wrote the book 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'.

Lots of other people through history has also tried to define what SF is, Wikipedia has a list of some of those. So as you might see defining SF is not an easy task. The seminar got me thinking in new ways about SF that I have not previously done and so it was a couple of hours well spent.

During the second seminar we spoke a bit about what SF can be used for (other than entertainment which is what it is at its' core) and what it can possibly teach us. One interesting part of this is what the US government thinks it can help us with or possibly prophecies about. About 15 years ago Arlan Andrews put together a group of SF writers and dubbed them Sigma, today Homeland Security Department is using the group to combat terrorism. All according to USA Today in an article written by Mimi Hall. Personally I do not put much stock in what USA Today writes but I do not believe that they would put together a full article that was a complete lie and also it is not all that inconceivable that there really is a group such as this helping HSD to come up with ideas on what might happen. Especially considering a lot of businesses most likely has used ideas found in SF over the years to make new things. Take a look at the list on that article page and you will find that we have H.G. Wells to thank for things like the atomic bomb, air planes, television and joystick controls. I would not be surprised if that was true and according to Godhe that is the case. Godhe says that we encounter things in SF and come to terms with them there and when we later come into contact with them we instinctively know what they are used for and why we should use them.

It would surprise me if there were not more examples like the one from Wells' literature. One of Godhe's favourite works to use as reference is Star Trek, mainly of course because most people know what it is, and one example of items used in there that could be compared to items we use in every day life is cell phones. Even though Robert Heinlein is usually acknowledged as the inventor (in terms of the inventor of the idea of it) of those.

SF can also be used to explore humanity and this has often been done through the help of aliens from outer space but there are many other examples of how this can be done. One of those examples is the film 'A.I.' by Steven Spielberg, where we meet an artificial boy that is coming to terms with that he is in fact artificial (if I remember correctly that is, it has been a while since I saw the film). There are several other facets to the story too but that is to much to delve into here. The story is based on a short story called 'Super-Toys Last All Summer Long' by Brian Aldiss.

Other than these things we also learned a little SF history, like the first person to define SF was Hugo Gernsback and the first piece of work in the SF genre was Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'. Something we unfortunately did not delve that deep into was post-apocalyptic SF works. We did speak about films like 'The Day After Tomorrow' and 'The Terminator' and what they had to teach us but since post-apocalyptic SF happens to be the area I enjoy the most of the genre I thought it was a pity we did not speak more about that. The main reason I enjoy post-apocalyptic SF more than other is that I believe it both serves as a proper warning about where we are headed and also because it pulls humanity back to the basics without all the technology we have today to help us in our every day life. And so we can learn a lot about what makes us human by exploring the animal side of us you might say.